Insufficient Space in file

[rawagah]

Dears,

I get this error a lot and I have gotten mixed answers, some say it's a RAM issue while others say it's the storage size. 

ERROR: Insufficient space in file MYLIBRARY.MYTABLE

ERROR: File MYLIBRARY.MYTABLE is damaged. I/O processing did not complete.

However, I can work around it by just changing the library from my own to WORK library. This is frustrating as I need the output to be saved permanently. What can I do to solve this issue? 

[Anand_V]

Hi @rawagah 

Looks like the library path you wish to save your data permanently has less space than the file size. you may try to point your library to a different location with more disk space.

Thanks!

[rawagah]

Thank Anand_V, 

Makes sense. But this also happens the other way around, in some other sessions I get this error on WORK but then it magically works fine when I change the path to permanent library.

[andreas_lds]

WORK and MYLIBRARY most likely point to different drives, so it is not that strange that you receive the error message sometimes for WORK and sometimes for your library. You should talk to your server-admins, maybe they have defined a quota for WORK.

[Kurt_Bremser · Accepted solution]

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@rawagah wrote:

Dears,

I get this error a lot and I have gotten mixed answers, some say it's a RAM issue while others say it's the storage size. 

ERROR: Insufficient space in file MYLIBRARY.MYTABLE

ERROR: File MYLIBRARY.MYTABLE is damaged. I/O processing did not complete.

However, I can work around it by just changing the library from my own to WORK library. This is frustrating as I need the output to be saved permanently. What can I do to solve this issue? 

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This is surely not a RAM issue, it is an overflow in your (allotted) disk storage.

Determine where your permanent and WORK library are located (use the pathname() function), and then get yourself a picture of the free space there.

Note that wise administrators will take care that no single user can exhaust a shared resource by setting quotas there, so what is reported as free may not be what you as an individual can use.

WORK may be overused by remnants of crashed (or non-gracefully terminated) SAS sessions; this can be remedied by using the cleanutil utility provided by SAS.

It is always a good idea to try the compress=yes dataset option when dealing with large datasets; if you have long character variables, the compression factor can exceed 90 percent.

And, as always, Know Your Data (Maxim 3). You may have variables defined with default lengths that waste space unnecessarily, are always missing, contain redundant values, etc etc.

[TomKari]

The advice from @Kurt_Bremser pretty much covers it all. Just one additional comment; sometimes it'll succeed on your MYLIBRARY, and sometimes it'll succeed on WORK, because the balance of free space on both devices will go up and down with the datasets that you and other users are adding and deleting. Completely unpredictable, and exactly what I would expect.

Tom