On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 19:37:56 -0000 "Cruces,GA (pgr)"
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 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!
If you have a (de)compression utility that you can call from the
DOS command line, then should it not be straightforward to
* keep a compressed version of your file(s)
* call the utility from within Stata (prompt or do file) to decompress
(commands line prefaced with -!-)
* do your Stata job
* call program again if necessary to compress again.
WinZip, one of the leading shareware compression utilities for Windows,
has a command line support add-on. See http://www.winzip.com/wzcline.htm
I expect you can do the same with a number of other utilities on
both Windows and other platforms
Stephen
----------------------
Professor Stephen P. Jenkins <[email protected]>
Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER)
University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1206 873374. Fax: +44 (0)1206 873151.
http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
