Last week, I wrote the blog post Using the BUFSIZE and BUFNO System Options in SAS. Here, I introduced the two SAS system options BUFSIZE and BUFNO. The BUFSIZE Option controls the physical size of each data buffer, that SAS allocates for I/O operations in memory. The...
The SAS Hash Object is a very efficient tool to look up data and much more. When we use a hash object, we expect it to be fast. Therefore we should tweak the different hash object options and argument tags to our advantage. This post presents the HASHEXP argument tag....
By-group processing is part of the game when we work with data in SAS. The usual approach for most SAS programmers goes as follows: Sort the data. Use the By Statement in the Data Step or procedure. Perhaps use first – and last dot notation in the data step to...
Last week, I wrote about how to Use Arrays To Look Up Data In SAS. There are numerous ways to combine data sets and look up data from multiple sources in SAS. Therefore it is essential to know the different approaches and when to use them. Today, I demonstrate how to...
Two heads think better than one. This is often true in the real world. However, in SAS it is more true to say that several heads think faster than one. This post shows you how to split processes to several threads to decrease wall clock time and increase performance...
When you want to sort a SAS data set, PROC SORT is the obvious procedure choice. In most cases it is also the most efficient. However, alternatives do exist. In this post, I will present example code of three alternatives to the SORT Procedure. Furthermore, I will...
