All depend on size when performance is getting more attention. All things like hasing and Proc SQL have been mentioned many times. Using Set / Key There are however still an other solutions: Using set wiht table lookup as example 8. SAS(R) 9.3 Statements: Reference The number of records 400.000 is not that big. If you have some variable like 10 of lengt 10 bytes (recordlength 100 bytes) is not bigger as 40Mb. That is small in our era using of Gb's en Tb's. All data could be easily fit into memory. Using point/set is more work but could be interesting on big-data approaches This is based on the approach of using a SAS datastet having a big SAS-dataset needed to get updated with lookups in a smaller dataset knowing the obs number. http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi30/061-30.pdf Yes, at that era proc sql, SAS/access was not evolved that far. We were start working with hard disks of 10Mb and 640Kb as internal memory. The big blue machines 16Mb internal with 1 Gb drives. That is humor seeing those figures. With your small data size of 400k records my advice would be go for the most simple to understand solution. When it performs sufficient you are ready
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