Fastest way to delete rows from a dataset by key

[ChrisNZ]

Also did you count the time recreating the index?

[Edoedoedo]

Yes, approximately 5 minutes

[ChrisNZ]

Since you are now doing a sequential copy (at which sas excels) read my comments in https://communities.sas.com/t5/Base-SAS-Programming/How-to-speed-up-performance-of-Sas-9-4-TS1M3-thr...

[ChrisNZ]

So 5 minutes out of 7 are spent recreating the index? really?

[Edoedoedo]

no no sorry I meant that 7 minutes are needed to create the table, plus more 5 minutes to recreate the index, so total 12 minutes, versus 20 minutes of MODIFY solution (which does all in one statement)

[ChrisNZ]

So the breakeven point (timewise) between modify and copy is a SMALL file about half the size.