Can SAS server workspace be compressed?

[MarkPeskir]

Hi,

My team and I are fairly new to SAS 9.4M2 server administration and configuration.  We support a small team of analysts today on an Office Analytics server that is also serving as a base SAS server for Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio usage.  

One of the analysts is running a PROC SQL that is joining several tables; when he attempts to execute, he gets a "SORT process failed" error and gets no result data file.  I do have an understanding on how SAS pulls and joins data in general, so I am assuming that his query is requiring more data than the workspace has capacity for.

Is there a way to configure the SAS workspace so that all data, temporary and "session-permanent", would be compressed on the workspace?  We can also add drive space to accommodate, and the analyst is willing to refine the query if needed, but from an IT perspective we would like to explore further tuning the environment to make sure we are getting the best usage out of our current space.

Thanks!

Mark

[LinusH]

You could set a system option compress=yes/char. Tjat would affect all created tables in permanent and temporary librefs. You probably want to use this on specific libraries since the compression requires more CPU and sometime tables can even grow larger than without compression depending on its structure.

But I don't think that compression will affect the utility file location, that SQL uses as spill file location.
So essentially I think expanding the Sas work area is a quite cheap and problem fixing operation.