topic Re: Turn off automatic compression of datasets? in SAS Programming

Turn off automatic compression of datasets?

shl007 — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:00:10 GMT

Hi - somehow in my code, even though I'm not setting options to compress datasets, the log file says it is such as below. Any ideas how I can turn off this "automatic" compression and instead invoke it at the END of my code?

NOTE: Compressing data set mylib.testdata decreased size by 59.25 percent.
Compressed is 5622 pages; un-compressed would require 13796 pages.

Re: Turn off automatic compression of datasets?

shl007 — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:30:24 GMT

I just found the culprit in my code, so now I'm wondering how I can invoke the compression at the end of the code and have it compress ALL the datasets the code ran through? Maybe I need to store each dataset in a table, then loop through that table to compress each dataset?

Re: Turn off automatic compression of datasets?

Ksharp — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:36:19 GMT

options compress=no;

Re: Turn off automatic compression of datasets?

Tom — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 13:30:21 GMT

@shl007 wrote:

Hi - somehow in my code, even though I'm not setting options to compress datasets, the log file says it is such as below. Any ideas how I can turn off this "automatic" compression and instead invoke it at the END of my code?

NOTE: Compressing data set mylib.testdata decreased size by 59.25 percent.
Compressed is 5622 pages; un-compressed would require 13796 pages.

If your datasets are compressing by 60% then you are probably better off leaving the compression on all of the time. Most SAS jobs are I/O bound and not CPU bound. So taking a few extra CPU cylces to compress/expand the records from the file is more than offset by the reduced number of disk reads and writes.