topic Re: Are there ANY adverse effects to using by statement's NOTSORTED option? in SAS Programming https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Are-there-ANY-adverse-effects-to-using-by-statement-s-NOTSORTED/m-p/95877#M20160 <HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY><P>Good question!</P><P></P><P>The option NOTSORTED cannot be used when the ordering of two or more datasets needs to be the same. You cannot use it in a datastep with MERGE and UPDATE. You can make NOTSORTED the default with global option NOBYSORTED.</P><P></P><P>More generally, I find the default option (that the observations are sorted by the BY variables) a useful safeguard against accidental reordering, as can happen for example as the result of a SQL query.</P><P></P><P>PG</P></BODY></HTML> Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:01:23 GMT PGStats 2013-02-03T18:01:23Z Are there ANY adverse effects to using by statement's NOTSORTED option? https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Are-there-ANY-adverse-effects-to-using-by-statement-s-NOTSORTED/m-p/95876#M20159 <HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY><P>I can't recall if this question has ever being asked. When one includes a by statement in a procedure, and follows the by variable names with the option NOTSORTED, and the data are sorted, the option doesn't appear to have any adverse effect.</P><P><BR />Does it have any effect(s) I'm not aware of?</P></BODY></HTML> Sun, 03 Feb 2013 14:59:11 GMT https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Are-there-ANY-adverse-effects-to-using-by-statement-s-NOTSORTED/m-p/95876#M20159 art297 2013-02-03T14:59:11Z Re: Are there ANY adverse effects to using by statement's NOTSORTED option? https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Are-there-ANY-adverse-effects-to-using-by-statement-s-NOTSORTED/m-p/95877#M20160 <HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY><P>Good question!</P><P></P><P>The option NOTSORTED cannot be used when the ordering of two or more datasets needs to be the same. You cannot use it in a datastep with MERGE and UPDATE. You can make NOTSORTED the default with global option NOBYSORTED.</P><P></P><P>More generally, I find the default option (that the observations are sorted by the BY variables) a useful safeguard against accidental reordering, as can happen for example as the result of a SQL query.</P><P></P><P>PG</P></BODY></HTML> Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:01:23 GMT https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Are-there-ANY-adverse-effects-to-using-by-statement-s-NOTSORTED/m-p/95877#M20160 PGStats 2013-02-03T18:01:23Z