Re: st: how to use multiple datasets?

[Richard Williams <Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.edu>]

At 05:37 PM 7/30/2005 +0200, Svend Juul wrote:

> Question:
> Is it a technical or legal constraint that forbids you to open a dataset 
> with Stata and next save a copy of it on your own computer?
>
> That seems to be neccesary to perform what you want. For each country:
> 1. Open the dataset from the server.
> 2. -keep- the variables you need.
> 3. -save- the reduced dataset to your own computer
> 4. modify the X1,X2 variables to conform the same rules for all countries
>
> Finally, -append- the modified datasets.
This definitely sounds like the way to go to me.  The main problem, I 
suppose, would be if you do not have write-access to the hard disk, or for 
some legal reason are not allowed to make extracts or copies.  If so, you 
could do something like

use file1.dta
...do whatever to X1, X2
gen fixed = 1
append using file2.dta
...do whatever to X1, X2 if missing(fixed)
replace fixed = 1
append using file3.dta
etc., etc.

-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
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