I also remember somebody posting the comparisons in the time it takes
to sort a large file under different scenarios, and the bottomline was
that if it is already sorted, -sort- is very quick, so if you need to
verify whether the data are sorted, and resort them if they are not,
you can just do -sort- on them without major sacrifice in computer
time.
If you suspect any particular command, you can check whether it has
-sortpreserve- in the -program- statement at the top of the ado-file.
It might provide a little bit faster sorting through Stata Corp's
internal code, rather than through the -sort- command that you would
have to issue otherwise.
Other than that, you cannot do much with the sorting, and it can be
quite time consuming indeed :((.
Stas
On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:54:25 -0000, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
> help sort
>
> -sort- doesn't sort if the observations
> are already sorted according to the order
> specified.
>
> help missing
>
> Nick
> [email protected]
>
> Barbara Hofmann
>
> > are there any commands which change the actual sort sequence
> > of a dataset?
> >
> > We got the problem of having some big datasets that must to
> > be sorted every time by the same variables before executing
> > commands on them. It takes up a lot of time to sort them, so
> > we got two questions.
> > First, are there certain commands that change the sort
> > sequence and others who keep it? And second, is there any
> > command (e.g. assert) in order to check the sort sequence and
> > only in case of being unsorted sorts the data?
> >
> > ps: what is the intern value of a missing?
>
> *
> * For searches and help try:
> * http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
> * http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
> * http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
>
--
Stas Kolenikov
http://stas.kolenikov.name
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
