st: Re: Stata appears to be eating some string IDs when saving a file

["Dimitriy V. Masterov" <dvmaster@gmail.com>]

I believe I diagnosed the issue. This seems to happen when I am
running low on space in my home directory on the server. When I freed
up some space, the problem went away. I wish there was some sort of
warning to alert users that this is happening. This has been a very
frustrating and terrifying experience.

DVM

On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 2:25 PM, Dimitriy V. Masterov
<dvmaster@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am having a strange problem with Stata deleting the values for about 80%
> of my data when I save a file. It only does it for string variables,
> and this only happens some of the time that I run this code.
>
> Here's the relevant part:
>
> . des ;
>
> Contains data
>   obs:    10,766,127
>  vars:             4
>  size:   387,580,572
> ------------------------------
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>               storage  display     value
> variable name   type   format      label      variable label
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> slr_id          str10  %10s
> byr_id          str10  %10s
> item_id         str12  %12s
> pt_m2m_cat      float  %21.0g      pt_m2m_cat
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sorted by:
>      Note:  dataset has changed since last saved
>
> . assert !missing(slr_id) & !missing(byr_id) & !missing(item_id) &
> !missing(pt_m2m_cat);
>
> . count;
> 10766127
>
> . save "pt_m2m_cat.dta", replace;
> file pt_m2m_cat.dta saved
>
> . use "pt_m2m_cat.dta", clear;
>
> . assert !missing(slr_id) & !missing(byr_id) & !missing(item_id) &
> !missing(pt_m2m_cat);
> 3407873 contradictions in 10766127 observations
> assertion is false
> r(9);
>
>
> My Stata MP is 12.1 (March 20, 2013), on an Ubuntu box. Any ideas how
> to diagnose this?
>
> DVM
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/