Date:         Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:24:25 -0400
Reply-To:     "Teed, Lionel" <Lionel.Teed@TD.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "Teed, Lionel" <Lionel.Teed@TD.COM>
Subject:      Re: Clarify a Couple of SAS Buffer Questions
Comments: To: Andy Arnold <awasas@COX.NET>
In-Reply-To:  <201108221914.p7MIQiPr017117@waikiki.cc.uga.edu>
content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

Hi Andy.

Just a quick question if I may. Is this a straight Read, update/verify and then write process? If so, are you creating a SAS dataset in the step. If not, are you using a Data _Null_ statement?






Lionel Teed | Senior Manager, TD Waterhouse Financial Planning | T: 416.982.6763 | C: 647.965.9237


-----Original Message-----
From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Andy Arnold
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2011 3:14 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Clarify a Couple of SAS Buffer Questions

Please clarify a couple of SAS buffer questions.

1 - Does BUFNO=10 allocate 10 bytes or 10 pages or 10 buffers of a SAS-determined size?  The SAS Docs are unclear to me on this.
2 - How can I find out how many buffers SAS assigns to an input dataset for any given step?

A little background ...
I'm trying to improve the performance of a single step that takes 7+ hours to process the file.  I want to experiment with BUFNO=, but it seems silly to try any value less than the value the step automatically uses.

The file has 1B to 4B records; it is not indexed.  The data sits on an AIX server and I read it with a SAS job that runs from the AIX command line on the same server.

The step performs simple missing, zero, min/max error checking on 8 fields, plus hash lookup validation on a half dozen fields, and calculations to check other fields.  Each & every record must be checked.

Thanks for the help.

--Andy Arnold

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