Re: st: -collapsetofile-

[Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net>]

I think you can get all the info you need to write Stata files here:

 http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?dta_115


A utility for writing out eg a matrix to a .dta file would be very 
useful, but I can't seem to find one anywhere. I usually write out as a 
CSV file and then insheet it, which works well enough.
cheers,
Jeph





On 2/28/2014 1:19 PM, Nick Cox wrote:
> -save- is part of the executable
>
> . which save
> built-in command:  save
>
> and so its code is not accessible to users.
>
> Nick
> njcoxstata@gmail.com
>
>
> On 28 February 2014 18:06, Andrew Maurer <Andrew.Maurer@qrm.com> wrote:
> > Hi Statalist,
> >
> > I've written a pair of program -collapsetofile- and -recover- to allow users to "collapse" data to a file without destroying the dataset like -collapse- does. I don't know if anyone else will have use for this, but it will save me a lot of computer time when dealing with large datasets. I would be very interested if anyone has any input or comments on how to improve coding efficiency / style (the code is still a bit rough).
> >
> > ado file (collapsetofile.ado): http://codepad.org/DcwtvDEb
> > ado file (recover.ado) : http://codepad.org/csZhQvb0
> > sthlp file (collapsetofile.sthlp): http://codepad.org/AsKC79uK
> >
> > The biggest improvement would come from being able to save directly to a .dta. I assume that this would require either:
> > 1) looking at the format/header/footer of stata dtas in clear text and fwrite()'ing it from mata, and/or
> > 2) looking at the source for a command like save and just copying that (is the source for -save- available?)
> >
> > Before writing this I found myself waiting for hours when graphing summary statistics of large datasets with sequences of:
> >
> > use fulldata // this could be >10gb
> > preserve
> > collapse (sum) thisvar thatvar, by(byvar1 byvar2)
> > ... some data manipulation
> > twoway line...
> > restore
> >
> > preserve
> > collapse (sum) anothervar yetanothervar, by(byvar3)
> > ... some data manipulation
> > twoway line...
> > restore
> >
> > ...
> >
> > preserve
> > collapse (sum) more vars, by(byvar10)
> > ... some data manipulation
> > twoway line...
> > restore
> >
> > For a 20gb dataset with 10 graphs, that makes 10 preserves/restores * 20gb = 200gb written/read to disk. -collapsetofile- writes just the collapsed data to be graphed to a file with no other disk reads/writes:
> >
> > use fulldata
> > collapsetofile (sum) thisvar thatvar using dataforgraph1, by(byvar1 byvar2)
> > collapsetofile (sum) anothervar yetanothervar dataforgraph2, by(byvar3)
> > ...
> > collapsetofile (sum) more vars, by(byvar10)
> >
> > recover dataforgraph1, clear
> > ... some data manipulation
> > twoway line...
> > ...
> > recover dataforgraph2, clear
> > ... some data manipulation
> > twoway line...
> > ...
> >
> > Thanks to Nick Cox for mentioning the importance of saving characteristics/metadata with the dataset.
> > Thanks to Sergiy Radyakin for making me realize that I could never write a mata program that would compute stats "by" variables as fast as stata's -_mean- in -collapse-, since stata's built-in C code can take advantage of parallelization, while mata code cannot.
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