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Re: Re: st: .dta storage, why is too big?
From
Austin Nichols <[email protected]>
To
[email protected]
Subject
Re: Re: st: .dta storage, why is too big?
Date
Wed, 8 Jun 2011 15:17:42 -0400
Clyde Schechter <[email protected]>:
If you save a bunch of bytes as doubles, it is easy to have a .dta
file bigger than the .txt file.
A good reason to always
. destring, replace
. compress
before saving.
On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Clyde Schechter
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jun 2011, Daniel Marcelino wrote:
>
>> Hello for all,
>>
>> today I came across my old and new files size, R and Stata storage
>> respectively. This got me thinking about why Stata compression is too
>> inefficient compared to R? Even thought I use variable attributes like
>> labels R compression is incredible. For example, 530 mb of Stata file
>> turns into 9 mb R file and about 330 mb as txt file. So, my point is:
>> do you know any trick to compress Stata files addition to command line
>> "compress".
>
> and Daniel Feenberg replied that Stata doesn't do any "Shannonesque
> compression."
>
> That is true, but I really wonder if there isn't something wrong with
> Daniel Marcelino's Stata installation, or something very odd about the
> file that provoked his post. I have been using Stata since version 4 and
> I have _never_ in all those years encountered a data set that was larger
> as .dta than as a text file. The .dta version may not be much smaller
> than the text version, but, I have never seen it be larger.
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