[Gretl-users] ODBC data import problems

Herewith some responses to questions about importing data from ODBC as raised by Alessandro Astuti in these two postings: http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-users/2015-November/011310.html http://lists.wfu.edu/pipermail/gretl-users/2015-November/011348.html Sorry this has taken a while. 1) Importing string-valued variables Alessandro writes: "In gretl, importing numeric columns from a db table works correctly, but I can't figure out how to import character values columns. For example, my favorite test db is world, the one containing all the world countries and the cities; I can import in gretl the columns for population and for gnp, for example, but not the one containing the names of the countries." On looking into the code, I see that character (or string) data series are just not supported by our ODBC importer at present. We'll handle strings, but only in constructing observation markers for matching against markers present in the dataset. At present gretl will read string-valued series only from CSV/text data files or native (gdt or gdtb) files. You could file a feature request for this; see https://sourceforge.net/p/gretl/feature-requests/ 2) Crash on importation Alessandro: "what I'm trying to import is the columns of a view with 7223 rows, created starting from a such complex query; the problem is that when trying to perform this, gretl crashes. I got this code in my console after gretl imported the penultimate row: *** Error in `/usr/local/bin/gretl_x11': free(): invalid next size" I have found, and fixed in git, something that might be responsible for this problem. If you're able to build gretl from git and try your import again, that would be great. -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University, NC