I would note that TDA (somewhat obscure, but very good, software
primarily for transition data analysis) has this feature to some degree.
Being able to pull a subset of variables or cases out of a massive
dataset without having to decompress the entire dataset can be very
helpful. TDA happens to use the .zoo format for historical reasons, but
zip would certainly be a more logical choice if starting fresh.
Thank you to the Stata staff for listening to our never-ending lists of
ways to improve an already great product.
Glenn
Glenn Hoetker
Assistant Professor of Strategy
College of Business Administration
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
217-265-4081
[email protected]
"Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm."
Sir Winston Churchill
-----Original Message-----
From: Cruces,GA (pgr) [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 1:38 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: st: Saving data in compressed format? - wishlist...
Dear All,
As you might have noticed, "zipping" a .dta file often results in
compressed files that are less than one tenth of the original file size.
I couldn't find any documentation on a compressed stata file format - if
there is, please let me know and ignore the rest of this message. I
solve the problem of large files (in Windows) by compressing the folder,
so it uses less disk space, but it is still a problem when you want to
transfer or transport files.
I don't really know what it would take, but my guess is that it wouldn't
be too hard to store the files in some sort of compressed format, and
having Stata decompressing them on the fly when opening. I could even
think of having very large datasets (larger than physical memory)
compressed in memory... but that would probably slow things too much.
Since I don't think this will be implemented soon, could someone share
experiences on invoking Windows apps from within stata? I'm thinking
about doing some sort of "usezip" program that would open .zip files...
Thank you!
All the best,
g.
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