Improve performance by resetting your char column length

Started ‎04-02-2015 by

Modified ‎10-05-2015 by

The following note applies to SAS Data Loader 2.2 for Hadoop and to SAS Data Loader for Hadoop (Trial Edition).

Some SAS Data Loader directives use a SAS Server (SAS Workspace Server) to read or write tables. By default, the character columns for the input tables to such directives are expanded to 32K in length. Most columns do not need to be this long, and this setting can negatively impact your performance.

For best performance, we recommend that you reduce the default length of the character columns for these input tables. Specify a value, such as 1024, that is short enough to help performance but long enough to avoid truncating the data in character columns.

See the User’s Guide for more information: Changing the Default Maximum Length for SAS Character Columns