Re: st: Multiple simultaneous STATA sessions on Mac

[Phil Schumm <pschumm@uchicago.edu>]

On Aug 3, 2010, at 4:01 AM, Francesca Fabbri wrote:
> I use STATA 11 on my Mac and I have a problem. On Windows I can open  
> several STATA sessions (to look at different data sets)  
> simultaneously, but I haven't worked out how to do it on the Mac.  
> Does anybody know?


Two comments.  First, Stata's paradigm is to have one dataset in  
memory at any given time.  Launching multiple instances of GUI Stata  
just so you can view multiple datasets at once is really just a kludge  
to mimic a hypothetical Stata where you could have multiple datasets  
in memory at once, and view them simultaneously.  Of course, what  
you'd really want to be able to do is to have access to both datasets  
from the same process, which this kludge wouldn't permit anyway.  So,  
working within the Stata paradigm, if you want to view both datasets  
(in Stata) together, you should first bring them together (i.e., via - 
merge-, -append-, etc.).

Second, OS X works hard to keep you from running multiple instances of  
its GUI applications.  Doing so is confusing, and can cause problems  
(e.g., as multiple copies of the same application try to access and/or  
modify the same configuration files, cache files, etc.).  It simply  
isn't the way the Finder was designed.  Mac development has always  
emphasized using multiple windows within the same instance of an  
application rather than running multiple instances.

That said, in the spirit of full disclosure, you can launch multiple  
instances of GUI Stata on OS X by using open with the -n switch.  For  
example, on my machine

    open -n /Applications/Stata/StataSE.app

(you might have to modify the path, depending upon which version of  
Stata you have installed, and where it is installed).  I believe this  
should be fairly safe (the most you might do is corrupt your  
preference file(s)), but can't guarantee it.

Note that I would strongly suggest finding another approach.  For  
example, if your dataset(s) are small and you want to look at them  
side-by-side, open one in Stata and the other in a text editor, or  
perhaps a spreadsheet program.  You can also summarize both datasets  
using -codebook-, -inspect-, etc., write these to separate log files,  
and then open the logs side-by-side.  Finally, if you're really doing  
a lookup type of operation between the two datasets, then this would  
likely be more efficient if you merge the two together into a single  
dataset.


-- Phil

P.S. What I've said above applies only to GUI Stata, of course;  
running multiple instances of console Stata or multiple batch jobs is  
a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

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