topic Re: SAS buffer size in SAS Programming

SAS buffer size

Pooja98 — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 07:06:57 GMT

While running the code, What will be the buffer size, if my SAS data file size is 10GB?

Re: SAS buffer size

ChrisNZ — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 07:51:22 GMT

Are you referring to data set options BUFSIZE and BUFNO?

The first one is defined when the data set is created, the second one is set at run time.

Re: SAS buffer size

Sajid01 — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:51:43 GMT

Hello @Pooja98

One should note that the operating system has its own approach to reading writing data to disk. Typically, Linux and Window may read one buffer at a time.
By default, SAS automatically determines the buffer size depending upon the observation length, the operating system and the engine used.

For smaller observations, one may consider increasing the number of buffers but for others one can experiment in their environment.

Re: SAS buffer size

Tom — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:56:31 GMT

@Pooja98 wrote:

While running the code, What will be the buffer size, if my SAS data file size is 10GB?

Why would you care?

Are you perhaps talking about downloading data from a remote database using a libname engine or the CONNECT statement in PROC SQL?

Re: SAS buffer size

ChrisNZ — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 03:19:38 GMT

Why would you care?

These settings can have a massive influence Tom.

See the last post in

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/How-to-speed-up-performance-of-Sas-9-4-TS1M3-through-enterprise/m-p/276653

about reducing the time to just read a table from 195 seconds to 70s by simply changing the memory usage settings.