ERROR: An I/O error has occurred on file

[dincooo]

Hi experts,

There is a big inner join which takes approximately 20 minutes before. But today we are getting an error like this

(saswork space is 2 TB)

NOTE: There were 34434671 observations read from the data set  <table_name>

ERROR: An I/O error has occurred on file <table_name>

ERROR: Failure while merging sorted runs from utility file 1 to final output.

ERROR: Failure encountered during external sort.

ERROR: File  <table_name> is damaged. I/O processing did not complete.

NOTE: The SAS System stopped processing this step because of errors.

NOTE: SAS set option OBS=0 and will continue to check statements. This might cause NOTE: No observations in data set.

Many thanks,

Best Regards

[Kurt_Bremser · Accepted solution]

You're running out of space in the target library. Aside from a simple overall-out-of-space condition, you could also have an overrun of your individual quota.

Note: if everything is located in WORK, you need at least three times the size of the source table (source table, utility file, target table). If your table is stored with compress=yes, the utility file will be considerably larger than the source table, as it is not compressed. The tagsort option can be helpful in such cases.