Re: st: restricting Stata to behave as Small Stata

[Stas Kolenikov <skolenik@gmail.com>]

I can imagine that some programs generate enough -tempvar-s to exceed
the limits of Small Stata. E.g., scores for -_robust- estimation in
large models may cause problems. I ran into this recently in my own
work: a dataset of barely 30M generates enough crap for 300M in my
variance estimation problem. In a way, this is a scalability issue: if
you run -regress, _robust- with five predictors, you'll be totally
fine, but if you run it with 60 (out of 80 variables in the data set),
you hit Small Stata limits. The problem kinda reminds me of the Apollo
13 (real event and the movie) when the astronauts were setting up the
startup sequence so as not to exceed the capacity of the system.
(Thanks to Phil Schumm who brought me recently to an event with Apollo
13 survivors! :) )

As a user-programmer, I frankly cannot think off the top of my head of
other situations where this might be a problem... at least in the
programs I worked on lately.

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 11:47 AM, Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> That's an interesting claim, although quite unspecific.
>
> But if the implication is that those user-written commands use more
> resources than Small Stata allows, then it's not a criticism of those
> commands, except secondarily if the required resources are not
> documented or implied.
>
> Otherwise I have no idea what this implies. On behalf of
> user-programmers everywhere, I invite Constantine to make his report
> specific.
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> Constantine Daskalakis
>
> It's not as easy as this. Certain user-written commands won't run on
> Small Stata and unless you want to look carefully at their code there's
> no way to tell until you actually try them on a Small Stata. I've had
> the same problem myself.
>
> On 4/23/2010 12:02 AM, Richard Williams wrote:
>> At 09:46 PM 4/22/2010, Airey, David C wrote:
>>> .
>>>
>>> How can I hobble Stata 11 to behave as Small Stata? I wanted to know
>>> if Small Stata will run all exercises for a class.
>>
>> Here are the limits for small Stata:
>>
>> "Small Stata is limited to analyzing datasets with a maximum of 99
>> variables and 1,200 observations. Small Stata can have at most 99
>> right-hand-side variables in a model."
>>
>> Also, if you type -help limits- in Stata you will see what the other
>> limits are. My guess is that most of these won't affect you unless you
>> are doing something weird like giving them programs with super-long
> macros.
>>
>
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-- 
Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name
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