topic Sort Execution Failure in SAS Procedures

Sort Execution Failure

milts — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 09:00:56 GMT

Hi,

I have 3 greenplum tables (1.2 million recs,100+ numeric fields) each and then joined together with some small sas tables for lookup and then grouped by id. I have to run this process every month and from time to time I am able to process it successfully. But recently I have been hitting a sort execution failure when processing the join. MEMSIZE is already set to 8G(max) ever since. I have playing around with sortsize 1G, 2G up to 4G and this chunk still fails.

In terms of disk space of SAS server, we still have around 60gb in space. So I believe this shouldn't be much of an issue.

Greatly appreciate any advise on how to address this problem.

Thanks!

Re: Sort Execution Failure

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 11:08:13 GMT

Do you join in PROC SQL or with a DATA step? If SQL, try sorting with PROC SORT and doing a DATA step MERGE.

Re: Sort Execution Failure

MadhuKorni — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 13:31:16 GMT

Try using tagsort option in the sort statement.

Re: Sort Execution Failure

SASKiwi — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 19:31:34 GMT

What is the sort error message? Sorts can fail for a variety of reasons.

Re: Sort Execution Failure

ChrisNZ — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:40:29 GMT

Be careful, it is not MEMSIZE that matters here, it is REALMEMSIZE: you do not normally want your sort runs to use paging.

Here is how these options interact:

Figure taken from High-Performance SAS Coding: Polychrome: Christian Graffeuille: 9781514362310: Amazon.com: Books

Re: Sort Execution Failure

ChrisNZ — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:52:39 GMT

You can also use the details option to have more insight into what your proc sort is doing.