In Michael Mitchell's "Strategically using General Purpose Statistics
Packages: A Look at Stata, SAS and SPSS," he alludes to the superior ability
of SAS to read complex data files. Excerpting from Page 20 of the technical
report,
"Complex raw data files
Some raw data files are stored in a very complex format, perhaps having
varying numbers of variables. Without a doubt, SAS is the most powerful tool
for reading these kinds of complex data files and is the very best tool for
reading very complex raw data files.
Hierarchical data files
. . . It is harder to read in such files in SAS, however you have additional
power while reading the files in SAS. . Stata is the weakest program in this
respect, being hard to use (probably equivalent to SAS in difficulty) but
not offering the kind of additional power that you get in SAS."
Does anyone on the List know of a publicly accessible (ideally, uncontrived)
example of a complex data file that illustrates the advantages of SAS over
SPSS, Stata, and other packages for reading these? If so, could you please
post the URL? (Or the URL of a description of what such a data file would
look like--perhaps something like an anecdote or case study illustrating
the power of the DATA step with a particularly nasty example that some SAS
user encountered.)
I couldn't locate anything pertinent via the customary search engines. I'm
not referring to EBCDIC, XML (or even SAS 6.04 dataset files, apparently,
for that matter), but rather a file with a data organizational complexity
that illustrates what Michael is talking about. Thank you.
Joseph Coveney
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