Marc
I understand that R is staffed entirely by volunteers and I appreciate the
massive efforts that have created this awesome software. My suggestion was
aiming to encourage the Core team that one weakness of the present structure is
less-than-optimal interchangeability with SAS. If this were improved, it would
be a great service to the R community, particularly those of us in the
pharmaceutical development world who must interface with SAS.
I just wrote to David Smith at Revolution Analytics, encouraging him to
consider taking this on (as you suggested).
Dennis
Dennis Fisher MD
P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
www.PLessThan.com
On Jan 28, 2014, at 8:43 AM, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> wrote:
> Dennis,
>
> The key difference is that with R, you are, as always, dependent upon
> volunteers providing software at no charge to you, most of whom have full
> time (and then some) jobs. Those jobs (and in many cases, family) will be
> their priority, as I am sure is the case with Matt.
>
> Unless they are in a position where their employer specifically allows them
> to allocate a percentage of their work time to voluntary projects, like R,
> you are at the inevitable mercy of that volunteer's time and priorities.
>
> In the case of Stat/Transfer, they are a profit motivated business with
> revenue tied directly to the sales of the application. Thus, they have a very
> different perspective on serving their paying customers and can allocate
> dedicated resources to the functionality in their application.
>
> An alternative here would be for one of the for profit companies that sell
> and support R versions, to take on the task of providing some of these
> facilities and providing them back to the community as a service. But, that
> is up to them to consider in their overall business plan and the value that
> they perceive it brings to their products.
>
> Regards,
>
> Marc Schwartz
>
> On Jan 28, 2014, at 9:59 AM, Dennis Fisher <fis...@plessthan.com> wrote:
>
>> Colleagues
>>
>> Frank Harrell wrote that “you need to purchase Stat/Transfer", which I did
>> many years ago and continue to use.
>>
>> But I don’t understand why the sas7bdat package (or something equivalent)
>> cannot reverse engineer the SAS procedures so that R users can read sas7bdat
>> files as well as StatTransfer. I have been in contact with the maintainer,
>> Matt Shotwell, regarding bugs in the present version (0.4) and he wrote:
>> it tends to languish just one or two items from the top of my TODO... I
>> hope to get back to it soon.
>> I have also written to this bulletin board about the foreign package not
>> being able to process certain SAS XPT files (which StatTransfer handled
>> without any problem).
>>
>> I am a strong advocate of R and I have arranged work-arounds (using
>> StatTransfer) in these cases. However, R users would benefit from the
>> ability of R to read any SAS file without intermediate software. I would
>> offer to participate in any efforts to accomplish this but I think that it
>> is beyond my capabilities.
>>
>> Dennis
>>
>> Message: 23
>> Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 13:25:54 -0800 (PST)
>> From: Frank Harrell <f.harr...@vanderbilt.edu>
>> To: r-help@r-project.org
>> Subject: Re: [R] Handlig large SAS file in R
>> Message-ID: <1390857954542-4684250.p...@n4.nabble.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>>
>> For that you need to purchase Stat/Transfer.
>> Frank
>>
>>
>> hans012 wrote
>>> Hey Guys
>>> I have a .sas7bdat file of 1.79gb that i want to read.
>>> I am using the .sas7bdat package to read the file and after i typed the
>>> command read.sas7bdat('filename.sas7bdat') it has been 3 hours with no
>>> result so far.
>>> Is there a way that i can see the progress of the read?
>>> Or is there another way to read the file with less computing time?
>>> I do not have access to SAS, the file was sent to me.
>>>
>>> Let me know what you guys think
>>> KR
>>> Hans
>>
>>
>> Dennis Fisher MD
>> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
>> Phone: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
>> Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
>> www.PLessThan.com
>
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
