topic Re: Speeding Up EG in SAS Enterprise Guide

Speeding Up EG

BCNAV — Thu, 23 May 2019 14:26:22 GMT

I have a project given to me that I can optimize slowly over time. It takes about 70 minutes to run. How much time saved would I expect to gain if I simply export the code and run it outside of EG? This would be a quick way to speed up everything before doing any optimization. Just looking for a general answer as to what I should expect.

Thx

-Bill

Re: Speeding Up EG

ChrisHemedinger — Thu, 23 May 2019 14:59:19 GMT

You'll probably see a boost from that, but you won't really be able to know why and you might miss some opportunities.

First thing I'd try: use the Project Reviewer task (you'll have to download) to review how long each item in your project takes.

Next, look at the ODS results your project generates. Do you need them all? EG spends time downloading results from your SAS environment, so if you can eliminate some of those results that you don't use, you'll save time. Here's a tip about that.

Another potential opportunity is to combine data prep steps. Some EG users will stack multiple Query Builder steps to filter, then calculate, then join -- but all could be done in a single step. See whether you can combine some of these or maybe optimize into a code step if you are really familiar with SQL in SAS.

Chris

Re: Speeding Up EG

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 23 May 2019 15:45:32 GMT

Bad code is bad code (and good code is good code), if you run it through the project or in batch.

Maxim 2: Read the Log. Inspect the NOTEs after each step to identify the long-running steps/nodes. Then you can decide on possible optimizations.

Re: Speeding Up EG

andreas_lds — Fri, 24 May 2019 05:57:00 GMT

Hardly anything to add, but you should check the log for CEDA (cross environment data access) if the same dataset is read multiple times using CEDA, converting the dataset will reduce runtime.

Re: Speeding Up EG

Patrick — Fri, 24 May 2019 13:15:45 GMT

@ChrisHemedinger

This Project Reviewer task looks really useful. Are there any plans to make this task part of the product?

Re: Speeding Up EG

ChrisHemedinger — Tue, 28 May 2019 12:53:39 GMT

Some new features in SAS Enterprise Guide 8.1 will provide some of this. Specifically, the "Submission Status" window (a.k.a Task Status) now keeps the list/result of tasks you run in your session.

Re: Speeding Up EG

BCNAV — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 12:48:37 GMT

Sorry for the delay is responding...work sent me away for a bit...LOL

In terms of exporting the code, this works well, but I get the error:

The value '6THFRERGRP_CG_ENR'n is not a valid SAS name.

I do have the following at the start of the code though:

options validvarname=any;

Is this needed for every process flow that is exported when I choose Export all code in project? Project works fine in EG but this error occurs when running in base SAS.

Thx

Re: Speeding Up EG

BCNAV — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 16:27:09 GMT

NVM..it was the dataset name starting with a number Sorry