Merge not completing

[Raul Athwall]

While running my do file, my merge command is not running-

. merge m:1 date using "/Users/raulathwall/OneDrive/Dis STATA/Fama French factors.dta"
I/O error writing .dta file
    Usually such I/O errors are caused by the disk or file system being full.
r(693);

Not sure the exact reason, my files are all kb files, so size shouldn't be an issue

[Daniel Schaefer]

Weird. I'm surprised merge is writing a .dta file here. It seems like it should be reading a .dta and then preforming the merge operation in memory, not on the disk.

m:1 merges can cause the resulting dataset to grow by quite a bit. This is why SQL databases are structured the way they are: storing many to one relationships in a single table is space inefficient. Even if the file size doesn't grow too much, a few KB can be too much to store if you're already close to a full disk. I also notice you are using OneDrive. Is it possible your OneDrive is full? There may also be a network or login error that is preventing you from writing to OneDrive.

I might start by moving these files out of OneDrive to see if that helps. If it does, you have a OneDrive issue. If not, double check how much disk space you have available. If it still doesn't work, restart the computer and try running Stata as an administrator since it could be a file system permissions problem.