December 18, 2014 at 1:42 pm
Hoping someone has had experience importing data from SQL into SPSS. Obviously I would love to be able to perform this dynamically or on-demand from the users but I'm even having difficulty getting them the data they need.
The output they require contains over 1000 columns. I've never used SPSS before (and currently don't even have a license or have it installed) but apparently the data needs to be extremely flat so pretty much everything needs to be a column and each main entity can only have one row. I've got a pivot that works nicely to dynamically generate variable columns but SQL itself chokes on this much data in one row.
I see I can import from an ODBC database but without the data flattened out, it won't do the users any good.
Has anyone come across a solution for this? Is this a normal case for Statistical tools?
Thanks for any direction you can provide.
December 19, 2014 at 11:41 am
Beth, I don't remember much about SPSS from school, but I do use SAS every day, and it is 'normal' for stats procedures to run on a de-normalized dataset, where each observation (row) contains variables (columns) that would be stored in many related tables in a relational database. There are really two important steps in doing a statistical analysis: 1) create the dataset you need, and 2) perform the stats procedures on that dataset. I have found that some statisticians do not get involved with creating the dataset, they only put in a request to someone able to pull the data to create the dataset and make it available for analysis. However, there are many stats folks able to do both. Any stats package (including SPSS) has the ability to merge several normalized datasets into one 'flat' dataset for analysis. I would suggest you find a SPSS programmer able to do this, so you would only have to worry about importing the normalized datasets, then do the merging in SPSS. Just my two cents.
Greg
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