st: Save asarray

[Sergiy Radyakin <serjradyakin@gmail.com>]

Dear All,

I am interested in preserving an associative array between Stata sessions.

There does not seem to be a command that would save/load the whole
array as one binary object into a file, or I've failed to find one.

The array object itself appears to be a pointer, and thus can't be
saved as a matrix.

I can save an associative array by getting the list of all keys, then
looping through all the keys, getting their values and saving
key-value pairs. Restoring then is reading all the key-value pairs
sequentially and posting to the new array. Is there a faster/more
efficient way of doing this?

I am also interested in the limits of associative arrays (e.g. storing
~10mln keys of type: "2014_01_17_100_075_XYZ" and values of type
double). I am fine if it takes ~300mb in size, but will it be working
ok? (in my actual experiment the memory grew very fast and I had to
abort the experiment when >4GB where allocated and swapping became
intolerable.)

Thank you,
    Sergiy Radyakin
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