On Thu, 11 Jan 2018, Sven Schreiber wrote:
 Hi,
 I will be working with Midas in gretl again soon, and I've just reread (or 
 let's say, re-browsed) the midas_gretl.pdf guide.
 Looking at the section "importation via join", it occurs to me that this is 
 quite involved. In contrast, "importation from a database" is very simple.
 Shouldn't it be possible to just do something like this:
 <hansl-future>
 open AWM.gdt # quarterly
 join hamilton.gdt EXRITL --compact=spread  # monthly to quarterly
 </hansl-future>
 or perhaps the 'append' command is better suited than join here? So replace 
 the last line above with (which however gets all series, but that's OK):
 append hamilton.gdt --spread
 I guess this append thing would basically be a syntactic shortcut for this 
 block (more or less):
 pd = $pd
 store temp.gdt	# the currently active dataset
 open hamilton.gdt --preserve
 dataset compact pd spread
 store tempcompact.gdt
 open temp.gdt
 append tempcompact.gdt
 I'm ready to consider working more with the database storage format 
 (which I almost never have done), but is the above suggestion 
 unreasonable? 
Not unreasonable. We should be able to engineer a shortcut of this 
sort. I'll have to think about whether "append" or "join" is the 
better target for a special option.
Allin