Re: st: tabulate produces inconsistent output?

[Christian Raschke <crasch2@tigers.lsu.edu>]

Any other opinions?

The only suggestion so far is that I update my Stata. But I am fully 
updated and there are no further updates available, so that is not the 
problem.
I am very concerned because there are no errors or any other problems 
whatsoever that would indicate a faulty installation or the like. There 
are no red flags, only clearly incorrect output.
Christian



On 11/19/2011 1:42 PM, Christian Raschke wrote:
> Hello Stata-listers,
>
> I am running into the following very odd problem: I have a factor 
> variable that I would like to -tabulate-, but every time I use -tab-, 
> I get different results. When running -tab- back to back on the same 
> variable in the same data set I get entirely different results every 
> time.
> All the years that I have used Stata, I've never had anything like 
> this happen, so I am totally stumped. There are only 2 variables in my 
> data set: a variable "ID" that is storage type double and the variable 
> "pldel" that is storage type byte.
> Please see what I copied and pasted at the end of this email straight 
> from my interactive session. The same oddity occurs if I use the -tab 
> pldel, gen()- syntax; in that same session I continue to get different 
> results every time I run a simple tab, so the below are just two 
> arbitrary examples.
> If I open a new clean session of Stata, then tab works as expected. I 
> did not define any user defined programs or do anything anything else 
> of that nature in the broken session. The only commands in my Command 
> History are various versions of -use-, -tab-, -count-, -describe-, and 
> -browse-.
> So, what might have happened to break a basic command like -tab-? I 
> know that using a new session fixes the immediate problem at hand, but 
> I want to ensure that something like this does not happen in any of my 
> data analyses in the future!
> If it matters, I'm running Stata 12.0 SE 64-bit on a Windows 7 machine.
>
> I apologize if this has been discussed before, but a quick preliminary 
> search turned up nothing. I would appreciate any help troubleshooting.
>
> . tab pldel
>
>    Place of |
>    Delivery |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
> ------------+-----------------------------------
>           1 |    223,057       98.96       98.96
>           2 |      2,191        0.97       99.93
>           3 |        106        0.05       99.98
>           9 |         46        0.02      100.00
> ------------+-----------------------------------
>       Total |    225,400      100.00
> r; t=0.08 13:15:07
>
> . tab pldel
>
>    Place of |
>    Delivery |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
> ------------+-----------------------------------
>           1 |     62,726       99.41       99.41
>           2 |        351        0.56       99.96
>           9 |         23        0.04      100.00
> ------------+-----------------------------------
>       Total |     63,100      100.00
> r; t=0.08 13:15:11
>
> . count
> 3765064
> r; t=0.02 13:15:14
>
>
> Best regards,
>
> Christian Raschke
> PhD Candidate, Department of Economics
> Louisiana State University
> crasch2@lsu.edu
>
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