The first non-thesis project I worked on as an assistant professor used the 1 in 1000 Public Use Microdata Sample of the US Census. My recollection is that the sample had about 63,000 observations; I had to spin a tape to read data into a big iron VMS machine using SAS, and it took about 10 hours to do so. The year was 1990.
Yesterday, I read five year ACS household data into my Macbook Pro using Stata. It is broken into four files with about 1.5 million observations each. Each file took about 2 minutes to read. This is really, really nice.
Yesterday, I read five year ACS household data into my Macbook Pro using Stata. It is broken into four files with about 1.5 million observations each. Each file took about 2 minutes to read. This is really, really nice.
