Any reason to prefer XML (SMDX) to Excel or CSV

[Art Kendall]

I am expecting a few hundred thousand records.  fewer than 50 variables,
The provider can do
CSV
EXCEL 2003 or newer
XML (SDMX)

I am leaning toward 1 CSV file vs many pages in excel.
However, I have never used XML (SDMX)

Has anybody used XML (SDMX) to get data into SPSS? 
What do I need to consider?

[Art Kendall]

Although they did not say it it looks like some other section of the agency can produce SAS XPORT files.


If the people I am working with can produce SAS XPORT files, that would be better than XML because I have used XPORT file before.  But I would still like to hear about. XML files in case they cannot produce the SAS files.


On 1/26/2013 11:24 AM, Art Kendall wrote:

I am expecting a few hundred thousand records.  fewer than 50 variables,
The provider can do
CSV
EXCEL 2003 or newer
XML (SDMX)

I am leaning toward 1 CSV file vs many pages in excel.
However, I have never used XML (SDMX)

Has anybody used XML (SDMX) to get data into SPSS? 
What do I need to consider?

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[Zuluaga, Juan]

I would ask them for a sample of the same data in all formats.

A database I use for my work produces "xls" files that are not really xls but an xml that Excel can read, most of the time.

SPSS can't read them too well. So I convert them to true Excel and then to csv.

I prefer to have csv, but my files are very simple, flat, no fancy structure,
and I need to keep them for archival purposes, sure that they can be read in 25 years. No opaque binaries, but text.

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[Andy W]

SPSS does not have any native facility to read in XML data (you should open up some example XML data to see what it looks like). I suspect to utilize it one would need to import XML into a real database and then query the data using SPSS. Either that or perform very tedious text munging to get the data in the appropriate data matrix format.

Importing the data into a database isn't necessarily a bad thing, but adds another step to the process that won't be necessary with csv. You could also build your own database with the csv data, so there aren't any obvious advantages to working with XML that I can tell. [Note: XML is popular sometimes because of standardized versions to share sensitive data - so it would be nice if SPSS in the future had the capability to read such data given a schema]

I will give the caveat that I wouldn't be surprise if you can wrangle SPSS 'data list' command to read in XML directly how you want it (or you can get ODBC configurations to query the data directly) - but I'm not familiar with such situations (so maybe others can comment).

No serious person should ever trade data in xls or any various excel formats, so that isn't even worth consideration. In addition to what Juan says about pre-processed xls files being really in a different underlying text mark-up format, I've had issues with SPSS opening up these pseudo-xls files produced as regular output from other programs (as SPSS won't recognize them as xls files - but treats them as plain text).

[Jon K Peck]

SPSS does have an XML driver in the Data Access Pack, but XML is flexible enough to be almost anything, so coping with an XML format would not be my first choice given other options.


Jon Peck (no "h") aka Kim
Senior Software Engineer, IBM
[hidden email]
new phone: [phone]




From:        Andy W <[hidden email]>
To:        [hidden email],
Date:        01/27/2013 09:51 AM
Subject:        Re: [SPSSX-L] Any reason to prefer XML (SMDX) to Excel or CSV
Sent by:        "SPSSX(r) Discussion" <[hidden email]>

---

SPSS does not have any native facility to read in XML data (you should open
up some example XML data to see what it looks like). I suspect to utilize it
one would need to import XML into a real database and then query the data
using SPSS. Either that or perform very tedious text munging to get the data
in the appropriate data matrix format.

Importing the data into a database isn't necessarily a bad thing, but adds
another step to the process that won't be necessary with csv. You could also
build your own database with the csv data, so there aren't any obvious
advantages to working with XML that I can tell. [Note: XML is popular
sometimes because of standardized versions to share sensitive data - so it
would be nice if SPSS in the future had the capability to read such data
given a schema]

I will give the caveat that I wouldn't be surprise if you can wrangle SPSS
'data list' command to read in XML directly how you want it (or you can get
ODBC configurations to query the data directly) - but I'm not familiar with
such situations (so maybe others can comment).

No serious person should ever trade data in xls or any various excel
formats, so that isn't even worth consideration. In addition to what Juan
says about pre-processed xls files being really in a different underlying
text mark-up format, I've had issues with SPSS opening up these pseudo-xls
files produced as regular output from other programs (as SPSS won't
recognize them as xls files - but treats them as plain text).





-----
Andy W
[hidden email]
http://andrewpwheeler.wordpress.com/
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