MOST EFFICIENT WAY TO HANDLE DATA

[TBOWLINE]

We have data sets that include all the college's official STUDENT data 12 basic data ssts. Dteails include: students id, demographic codes (race sex dob county residence ENROLLMENT_STATUS majors COURSES GRADES TYPE_STUDENT HIGH_SCHOOL_CODE,ETC). These are all mostly numeric codes which I need to retain for those cases where I need to vlidate or use subsets od data sent down by oyr state agency for special project. Of courese when we do analysis for our internal population, we translate the codes into terns they understand ( demographics, 1st time freshmen, major_name, etc.).

My question: Is it more efficient to create extra variables in the data set with the literal for the code, or to use format statements whenever e produce internal reports?

thanks

 

[ChrisW75]

There's different ways of viewing efficiency. Using formats is more space efficient that adding extra variables, but is more CPU intensive when applying them. I would always go with the format though as the CPU trade off isn't really going to be particularly noticeable.
Also it's possible to add the formats toa generally accessible area so that the format definitions don't need to be re-run each time you access the data.