Re: Getting PSPP compiled version with PostgreSQL support

[Alan Mead]

Harry,

My replies are inline below.

Cheers!

-Alan

On 3/19/2016 9:38 AM, Harry Thijssen wrote:

Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 17:09:18 +0000
From: "Curran, Philip" <address@hidden>
To: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
Subject: Getting PSPP compiled version with PostgreSQL support

I would like to obtain compiled a compiled version of PSPP with PostgreSQL support included for Windows.  Can anyone list a location and version number for this?  I currently run 0.9.0-g745ee3 on Windows.

If you are able and willing to test it I can provide you with a version with PostgreSQL support. However I can't test it myself.

If you want to test it, let me know if you need a 32 or 64 bit version.

It sounds like Philip will use the Linux version, but if we wanted to test this, I'm happy to help using either 32- or 64-bits.  It would be more convenient to me to test the Windows version by reading data from PostgreSQL running on a Linux host.

I'd be curious to hear how Philip is using this feature because if you can get data from a database using a single select statement, then you can also redirect those data into a TAB delimited file.  So, this just saves you a step and I guess it would be mostly useful when you have to do it frequently.  But most of the databases I work with cannot (that I know of) generate the kind of data I want using a single select.  The typical database I use stores respondent meta data in a table like "respondents" and item meta data in a table like "items" and responses in a table like "responses". (Without any promise that all respondents have answered the same items.) So, I have to write a small script in some higher-level language to marshal these data and output the rectangular (rows and columns) data that PSPP expects as a TAB-delimited file.  The other common use I make of databases is simply to store YAML strings of serialized data structures that internally contain the state of a survey, including responses, etc. Directly SELECT'ing this state column is even less helpful.

Also, of course, SQL engines typically have in-built functions to compute simple descriptive statistics on SELECT'ed data (e.g., SELECT AVG(elapsed_time) FROM data WHERE grade = "pass"; SELECT AVG(elapsed_time) FROM data GROUP BY grade;)

So, in short, although I'm sure that some people find it useful, I personally have never been tempted in SPSS or PSPP by the ability to sample data directly from an SQL table.  I suspect that it's an infrequent case where it's useful; but maybe it's sufficiently critical in that edge case to warrant better support. When Philip raised this, I searched the web for "pspp postrgsql" and PostgreSQL support is an advertised feature of PSPP that appears in many places on the web.

Have fun

@ Alan

Has anyone answered you off-line?  I don't know anything about PSQL support, but I see that it's not enabled in the Windows binaries

I wonder where you see that. In fact I don't know where to see it. Or was it on the list

I ran the syntax snippet in the manual:

https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/manual/html_node/GET-DATA-_002fTYPE_003dPSQL.html#GET-DATA-_002fTYPE_003dPSQL

 and PSPP output was:

error: Support for reading postgres databases was not compiled into this installation of PSPP

-- 

Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
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