Stata

Stata is a data management application that provides a statistical environment for both students and professionals. It's designed to allow users to manipulate data using nothing but graphical interface elements. That makes it easy to perform complex calculations without having to resort to command line-based solutions.

Users may find that they have certain data sets that consistently present reproducible results time and time again. Stata excels at crunching these numbers and turning them into detailed graphical objects that can then be embedded into pretty much any kind of report.

Importing or exporting data into Stata is easy because it works equally well with locally stored files as it does with objects stored on a network. It's also able to interface with several different types of standard databases.

Those who are interested in taking advantage of this feature will find that it works particularly well with SQL databases, which is particularly good news because of how common that platform has become. Those who prefer to use an open-source solution based around the ODBC framework will find that Stata has no trouble processing data streams this way either.

While you can interface the app with pretty much any modern spreadsheet program, it comes with one built in that can work with both text and binary data. All files created by Stata are stored in Unicode format, which means they can be shared with other statistical packages.

Perhaps most impressive, however, is the fact that Stata can handle literally billions of rows at a time while processing massive BLOB modules and thousands of variables.