help compress dialog: compress
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Title
[D] compress -- Compress data in memory
Syntax
compress [varlist]
Menu
Data > Data utilities > Optimize variable storage
Description
compress attempts to reduce the amount of memory used by your data.
Remarks
compress reduces the size of your dataset by considering demoting
doubles to longs, ints, or bytes
floats to ints or bytes
longs to ints or bytes
ints to bytes
strings to shorter strings
See [D] data types for an explanation of these storage types.
compress leaves your data logically unchanged but (probably) appreciably
smaller. compress will never demote a numeric variable if that would
result in a loss of precision nor will it truncate strings.
Example
. sysuse auto
. compress
Also see
Manual: [D] compress
Help: [D] data types, [D] recast
