Re: st: Transfer of value labels: SQL data to Stata

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

At 3:48 PM +0000 1/25/05, Lopman, Benjamin A wrote:
> Transferring the data itself is of course no problem through an ODBC
> connection.  The problem is handling the value labels.  (The variable
> labels are also tricky but not such a major issue).  The problem is
> mainly with the categorical variables and is as follows:
>
> In Access (or any other database, as far as I am aware) the labels are
> stored in a separate table.  For example, 1 and 2 are stored in a data
> table and the  corresponding Male and Female labels are stored in a
> second "lookup" table.  That is not how Stata or SPSS stores labels, so
> when the data is brought back into one of those packages, the value
> labels are lost.  I want to retain the numerical data and retain the
> labels.  I am concerned about this because the dataset is so large  that
> I don't want to have difficult to interpret  numerical data when the
> data is shared with other analysts.

I'm not aware of any existing way to do this automatically; note that 
such a method would need to be able to figure out that a particular 
column in the "lookup" table contained string labels for a particular 
numeric column in the data table, and this might be difficult (if not 
impossible) to do in any generalized way.  If it were me, I'd look to 
see if the lookup tables are linked to the data table via foreign 
keys.  If so, then you could use the presence of such relationships 
to establish the correspondence between a particular column in the 
data table and the table containing its "value label".  And if the 
lookup tables all use the same names for their two columns (e.g., 
"code" and "label"), then you could programmatically use the records 
in each table to build Stata code defining a value label and 
attaching that label to the corresponding variable(s).  This code 
could then be run on the data extracted from the data table via ODBC.


-- Phil
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