Today I had to install TOra with Oracle support. That was interesting. TOra is on the Synaptic list, but if you install it from there you only get PostgreSQL support. For anything else you need to build TOra from source. Instructions are here, courtesy of Brad Hudson. Follow them. In particular, do not skip [...]

In my oldest post about the odbc load command I mentioned that you can pretty easily read data from MS Access into Stata, and even execute SQL commands from within Stata, but I dismissed the whole thing a bit too lightly. A recent look on Google Analytics showed that some people came here looking for [...]

I don't like spreadsheets. I like data sets and matrices. But I get data in Excel workbooks all the time, and it's a pain in the neck. This will never go away altogether, but if my Stata-using colleagues could be persuaded to quit sending me spreadsheets, that would at least cut down on the volume. [...]

ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity; odbc load is a tool for getting data out of ODBC-ready applications and into Stata quickly and reliably. One such application is Microsoft Excel. If you haven't yet received data in an Excel workbook, you will.
Just to get it out of the way: if you run Stata 10 and [...]