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Re: st: data type question


From   David Kantor <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: data type question
Date   Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:40:59 -0500

At 04:01 PM 2/18/2009, Rike wrote:
when using "compress" to free up room in the memory, i see that some
variables have their data types changed from byte to float. When I
look at stata's help file for data types however, it says that "byte"
takes up 1 byte, while "float" takes up 4 bytes.

My questions:
1) why is it that stata changes data types from byte to float when
float is supposed to take up more space?
2) In order to free up space, is it better to manually set the
variable to "byte" when I generate them? (rather than compressing,
that is)

1: This seems odd. Are you sure that this change occurs in -compress-? There are other events that can cause a byte to change to float, but as far as I know, -compress- should not do it.

2: I usually try to choose appropriate types for as each variable is generated. Aside from the space consideration, it is just more appropriate to use byte, int, or long whenever the values are known to be integers.

HTH
--David

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