topic Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data in SAS Programming

Floating point zero divide when exporting data

deblee73 — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 15:38:50 GMT

I have SAS 9.4 and have been running the same jobs for over a year and all of sudden they will not export data to access databases or excel. I get the Floating Point Zero Divide error. It's just extracts, no calculations, etc.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

ballardw — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 16:30:25 GMT

@deblee73 wrote:

I have SAS 9.4 and have been running the same jobs for over a year and all of sudden they will not export data to access databases or excel. I get the Floating Point Zero Divide error. It's just extracts, no calculations, etc.

Have you had any changes to your environment: Change in SAS licensed products or configuration, change in Office version, change to SAS server (where Office may not be available)?

A "sudden change" usually points to an environmental change of some sort. But if your IT department is like mine it may take a while to determine what changed.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

deblee73 — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 16:35:13 GMT

Thanks for the response.

I am not (aware) of any changes. I'll have to see if we had any auto updates last night done by IT. I know when we do, we will have some issues with MS Access or MS Excel but we tend to work them out ourselves. Our new SAS license updates happen at the end of the year so no changes in 6 months.

This happened for the first time last week. I did a reboot (last resort) and it was fine for a few days then it happened again today when jobs failed at export. I did a reboot again but didn't fix the problem this time.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

ballardw — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 16:57:29 GMT

@deblee73 wrote:

Thanks for the response.

I am not (aware) of any changes. I'll have to see if we had any auto updates last night done by IT. I know when we do, we will have some issues with MS Access or MS Excel but we tend to work them out ourselves. Our new SAS license updates happen at the end of the year so no changes in 6 months.

This happened for the first time last week. I did a reboot (last resort) and it was fine for a few days then it happened again today when jobs failed at export. I did a reboot again but didn't fix the problem this time.

So what you have is an intermittent problem, which is not quite the same as a "fails every time".

If any of the sources are on networked locations you may be running into a network issue: bandwidth, data volume, target destination data size limits, getting kicked off by users with higher priority, services restarting in mid-job (or that need to be restarted) or any number of things. You may want to be recording very precise times of failure and talk with your IT folks about traffic and such at those times.

If you can share the code and preferably a LOG of one of the failures someone may have additional ideas.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

Tom — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 17:03:04 GMT

@deblee73 wrote:

Thanks for the response.

I am not (aware) of any changes. I'll have to see if we had any auto updates last night done by IT. I know when we do, we will have some issues with MS Access or MS Excel but we tend to work them out ourselves. Our new SAS license updates happen at the end of the year so no changes in 6 months.

This happened for the first time last week. I did a reboot (last resort) and it was fine for a few days then it happened again today when jobs failed at export. I did a reboot again but didn't fix the problem this time.

Are you sure the error is not caused by changes in the data that is being exported? If you get the error are you able to re-run the export for that same data and consistently get the error?

Perhaps you are hitting some limit in the target system. For example you might have values too long for the Access column you are trying to write into. Or using the wrong character set. Or there might be constraints on a column that limit the range of valid values.

Re: proc phreg ties handling - floating point zero divide

CHELS — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 12:42:19 GMT

We only had issues while running regression. We changed the ties handling
method and that solved the problem but we have never tried exporting
anything out. I guess what you are experiencing is more of a system issue
rather than a statistical one.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

deblee73 — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 17:41:10 GMT

Update: Was able to export to csv as a workaround.

Then, I changed DMBS=EXCEL to DBMS=xlsx and I can now export to Excel.

However, I still cannot export to Access. my DMBS=ACCESS.

Using SAS for Windows 9.4 and using Office 2016

Exporting 1 column, 2000 records, type CHAR $12

proc export data = work.test

outtable="test"

dbms=access replace;

database="c:\test_db.accdb";

run;

Error: Floating Point Zero Divide.

Error: Termination due to Floating Point Exception

Re: proc phreg ties handling - floating point zero divide

deblee73 — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 17:42:44 GMT

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, most posts i read are in regards to issues with statistical procedures. This is a simple extract, filter and group dataset I have been running and exporting for several years.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

Tom — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 17:45:28 GMT

Check with your IT support about what changes they have made to your Microsoft Office installation.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

deblee73 — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 22:04:17 GMT

I don't believe it's due to limitations. I did a sample of one record/one column and cannot export it.

Re: Floating point zero divide when exporting data

deblee73 — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 15:57:07 GMT

Thank you for the reply. No changes that I am aware of. Our license is renewed at the end of the year. No SAS configurations, etc. I look to see history of updates and there aren't any. I ask IT if any changes were made and they stare at me like a deer in headlights.