Date:         Thu, 2 Jan 1997 21:43:38 -0500
Reply-To:     us027283@mindspring.com
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From:         Dan McLaren <us027283@MINDSPRING.COM>
Organization: Phoenix Enterprises
Subject:      Re: COMPRESS Option (SAS 6.12)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Devi Katikineni wrote:
>
> Why would anyone NOT use the COMPRESS option in SAS?
>
> My colleage has been testing SAS code with and without the
> COMPRESS option.  The SAS dataset being used has 120,000 obs
> and 60 variables, and he is using SAS 6.12 on a pentium.
>
> He found that using OPTIONS COMPRESS significantly reduces both
> the process time and the dataset size.  He expected that there
> would be some overhead with the COMPRESS option, and so process
> time would be longer, but found that it was shorter??
>
> Any comments would be welcome.  TIA.
>
> Devi Katikineni
> Social & Scientific Systems, Bethesda, MD.
 
On my Unix systems compress causes an increase in processing time,
though
it's not much. Also, FSEDIT doesn't work in my version of SAS if the
dataset is compressed. There are a couple of other procs that don't
work right with compressed datasets, but I don't remember which ones.
 
Dan McLaren