Re: [Gretl-devel] database file size

On Wed, 22 Apr 2009, Sven Schreiber wrote: > I was wondering why the file size of a gretl database is so big compared > to the other storage formats. For example, I have a relatively large > dataset which fills up 1.4MB when exported to csv. (Of course, gretls > native and zipped file is much smaller, about 170KB.) When I save this > data to gretl binary database format I get a 2MB file. And I thought > that text files like csv cannot be beaten in terms of explicitness and > bloat... It depends on the nature of the data. In gretl db format data are stored as floats (4 bytes on a 32-bit system). This preserves about 8 significant digits, with is OK for primary economic data. So the size of a gretl .bin file is perfectly predictable. With CSV, gretl checks the number of significant digits and does not write more bytes than necessary -- so a CSV file may be larger or smaller than a db .bin file.