SPSS is a widely used program for statistical analysis in social science. It is also used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, marketing organizations, data miners, and others. The original SPSS manual (Nie, Bent & Hull, 1970) has been described as one of “sociology's most influential books” for allowing ordinary researchers to do their own statistical analysis. In addition to statistical analysis, data management (case selection, file reshaping, creating derived data) and data documentation (a metadata dictionary is stored in the datafile) are features of the base software.
To configure Drill to read SPSS files, simply add the following code to the formats section of your file-based storage plugin. This should happen automatically for the default cp
, dfs
, and S3
storage plugins.
Other than the file extensions, there are no variables to configure.
"spss": { "type": "spss", "extensions": ["sav"] }
SPSS only supports two data types: Numeric and Strings. Drill maps these to DOUBLE
and VARCHAR
respectively. However, for some numeric columns, SPSS maps these numbers to text, similar to an enum
field in Java.
For instance, a field called Survey
might have labels as shown below:
For situations like this, Drill will create two columns. In the example above you would get a column called Survey
which has the numeric value (1,2 or 99) as well as a column called Survey_value
which will map the integer to the appropriate value. Thus, the results would look something like this: