SPSS Format Plugin

Introduced in release: 1.18.

Drill provides a format plugin for reading and querying data files from Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

Configuring the SPSS Format Plugin

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"]
 }

Data Model

SPSS only supports two data types: Numeric and String. Drill maps these to its DOUBLE and VARCHAR types 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.

In this situation Drill will create two columns, one called Survey which takes on numeric values in { 1, 2, 99 } and another called Survey_value which contains the corresponding text. The next table gives an example of data returned by Drill when the Survey column is queried.