[Info-vax] Portable OpenVMS binary data format?

[John E]

> You have been exceedingly stingy at providing details such as the 
> volume of data involved, 

Because it's not one use case I'm considering, it's a multitude of use cases (with both large and small datasets, and some stuff that only needs to be transferred one time and in one direction and other stuff that needs to be transferred multiple times and in both directions).  I just wanted some general guidelines and info and am very grateful to you and others for the info.

> > E.g. you can process and whittle down a large Stata dataset on a huge 
> > linux machine with tons of disk & memory, then download the smaller 
> > dataset to you laptop for continued work.  Super convenient and 
 
> Something to aspire to?  Well, that's a pretty bad design, actually.  
> Primitive.  Clumsy.  I'd expect these and other tools — and the case 
> you're working on here — would work as well with remote access to text 
> or binary data over SSL, without having to transfer the files around.

I'm not going to argue this but don't really see what point you're trying to make.  In my mental model, SAS & stata data sets, HDF files, and CDF files are all trying to do more or less the same thing:  provide portable binary formats with metadata.  I don't understand why this is OK for CDF but not SAS or stata?  But I also only vaguely understand CDF as being similar to HDF which I'm more familiar with.

And I'm also not a huge lover of the SAS & stata walled-gardens approach, but if you're stuck in those lovely gardens the portable data formats are a nice feature, at least.