What could be the possible reason one SAS table is much bigger than the other one in size

[ciphercong]

Hi,

I created two tables with identical columns table A has 1.5 million records and SAS table B has 6.5 million records, saved in same library, both are read from text files. (A from A.txt and B from B.txt)

The problem I have is , although A is 1/4 the size of B , A is shown 50GB(yes 50GB) in storage and B is shown only 5 GB.

I wonder what caused that? Apparently based on my experience B's size looks reasonable, but I could not identify any issues with A, so I have no idea why table A took 50 GB in storage. (they have identical columns)

Thanks!!

[PeterClemmensen]

Run PROC CONTENTS on your data sets and check the lengths of the variables in them. Should give you the answer.

[ciphercong]

Thanks !

[Astounding]

It's possible you created A using compress=no and B using compress=yes (or possibly compress=binary).

[ciphercong]

Thank you! I think they are both uncompressed but worth trying..