On 4/30/08, Michael Blasnik <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
> First, Martin should note that SPSS does not have some magical way to hold
> data more compactly than Stata can. You just need to pick the proper
It depends on the data: SPSS has a compressed file format, which is
more efficient in storing strings, than Stata format. But you are
right that there is no magic in it.
Sergiy Radyakin
> storage types in Stata. I would guess that there are variables being held
> as doubles or long strings that don't need that much space. To get the most
> useful advice, you may want to -describe- one of your dataset chunks so that
> we can see where the storage is being used up.
>
> I often work with fairly large datasets (~1 GB) and one suggestion that I
> haven't seen mentioned thus far is to use -recast- with the force option to
> convert doubles to floats when feasible. I find that compress will rarely
> convert a double to a float even though the actual number is stored with far
> less than float precision. .
>
> Michael Blasnik
>
>
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