Advise on how much additional SAS work space should I request

[tsndrct1234]

Hello SAS Community!

I need your help estimating the additional workspace I should add on our SAS work. Currently I'm running a huge job on SAS EG that tries to join two huge table with roughly 9M and 5M records via Proc SQL and it causes I/O Error.

Do you have any rough estimate how much additional space I should request? Also, it's 75% of the flow I'm currently running so there would be upcoming jobs that needs to be executed and it might still use SAS work.

Thank you so much for your help!

[Ksharp]

Change your WOKR library path into another to make enough room for WORK library, like : D:\TEMP\

You can change it ,by add the following option into SASV9.CFG file.

-WORK "D:\TEMP\"

[Astounding]

It is difficult to believe that you have use for an output table with 45 trillion rows in it. 

Perhaps if you were to provide some details of the SQL code and what you plan to do with the results, there might be suggestions about other ways to approach the problem.

[Kurt_Bremser]

Please show your SQL code.

Also tell us more about the relationships between the two tables with regards to the key(s). If you have anything but many-to-many, sorting and a data step MERGE will be more efficient.

[Sajid01]

Often inefficient or incorrect SAS code some times result in large util files and the temporary work space gets filled up.  All running codes get impacted. This results in this type of errors.
Reach out to your SAS Administrator for assistance and investigation.

[Patrick]

Before considering to increase the disk space for WORK I'd be verifying two things

1. How much space would this SQL require? Is it eventually some badly formulated code that results in a cartesian join between two big tables?

2. Are there old Work spaces that haven't been cleaned-out? Are you regularly running cleanwork?

From a coding perspective

If you're creating big work tables then eventually delete them in your process scripted when no longer required (proc datasets/delete).

Depending on your usage of SAS you might also consider to point Work and Utilloc to different disks. But always ensure that these are disk with as much I/O as you can get.