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st: Update to package -gzsave-


From   Henrik Stovring <[email protected]>
To   statalist <[email protected]>
Subject   st: Update to package -gzsave-
Date   Fri, 07 Oct 2005 09:06:07 +0200

Dear all

Thanks to Kit Baum there is an updated version of the package -gzsave- available from the SSC repository. The update has corrected the filename handling, so that after opening a dataset with gzuse, the filename of the compressed file is now reported in for example the -describe- command, and not the temporary file name created during the decompression process. Thanks goes to my collegaue Morten Andersen for pointing this out.

From the description of the package:

*Description*

gzsave stores the dataset currently in memory on disk under the name filename. If filename is specified without an extension, .dta.gz is used.

gzuse loads a Stata-format dataset previously saved by gzsave into memory. If filename is specified without an extension, .dta.gz is assumed.


*Remarks*

These commands are useful for two purposes:

First, they obviously help lowering the space used on disk by a dataset, which may be important when storing very large datasets.

Second, they may help reduce network load when using a distributed disk system such as NFS. This is due to the fact that the commands only transfer the compressed datasets over the network, since the uncompressed dataset is only stored as a temporay datafile, which typically resides on the local disk (where local is relative to the
running instance of Stata).

The price paid for saving disk space (and network load) is the CPU time
used by gzip - please, test for yourself whether compression is actually advantageous in your specific set-up.

Best,

Henrik


--
Henrik St�vring, PhD

Research Unit of General Practice
University of Southern Denmark
J.B. Winsl�ws Vej 9
DK-5000 Odense C
Phone: (+45) 6550 3692
Fax: (+45) 6591 8296
email: [email protected]
Homepage: http://www.biostat.sdu.dk/~stovring
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