Date:         Thu, 14 Sep 2000 09:49:48 -0400
Reply-To:     "Malarkey, Pat" <PMALARKEY@ULLICO.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Malarkey, Pat" <PMALARKEY@ULLICO.COM>
Subject:      Re: SAS dataset filesize
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

Hi, Chris!

I had a similar problem on our Unix box.  It was solved by creating the SAS
datasets with compression on.  You can specify it in your runtime options
statement:

options compress=yes|no|char|binary

Here's a few words from the v8 online doc:

When COMPRESS=YES or COMPRESS=CHAR, SAS compresses the size of the data set
with run-length encoding. Run-length encoding compresses the data set by
reducing repeated consecutive characters to two- or three-byte
representations.

When COMPRESS=BINARY, SAS uses Ross Data Compression, which combines
run-length encoding and sliding-window compression to compress the data set.


Reader's Digest version:  Use YES or CHAR for files that are predominantly
character.  Use BINARY for files that are predominantly numeric.  NOTE: CHAR
and BINARY are only available in v7 on...

I hope this helps!

- Pat

-----Original Message-----
From: short, chris [mailto:cshort@ABARE.GOV.AU]
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2000 12:15 AM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: SAS dataset filesize


On converting a large ascii file to a SAS dataset - the SAS dataset is 3
times the filesize of the flat file.

Does this difference in filesize sound correct?

Since the flat files are around 10Mb each and there are several hundred of
these datasets - this constitutes a large storage issue.

Cheers,
Christopher

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