How do you make a SASFILE available to all server users without restarting the server?

[MattSan]

Hello All,

I would like to make a SAS dataset available to all users can be loaded into server memory (RAM) for sharing. I would like to not have to restart the server if I can (as indicated in the PROC SERVER ALLOCATE function). Is this possible?

Thank you.

[Kurt_Bremser]

How is your SAS set up? Do you use SAS/SHARE?

[MattSan]

I am not sure. How do I go about finding out if we have SAS/Share?

[SASKiwi]

What is your reason for wanting to share an in-memory SAS dataset on a standard SAS App server? This is exactly what SAS VA does. Is this a possibility for you as it would be a much more robust solution than SASFILE? 

[MattSan]

Hello, my team needs to access five readonly files on a regular basis and I thought that putting these files in memory would speed up I/O. We have quite a bit of RAM that is not being utilised on our server (128GB).

[MattSan]

This is exactly what I am looking for however I do not know how to implement this. Do you have any resources on how to implement this?

[ChrisNZ · Accepted solution]

The easiest way would be to create a RAM-based virtual disk, and copy the tables you want to accelerate there.

This will appear to SAS as a normal disk, and you can use it and manage it as any other disk resource from SAS.

[MattSan]

Thank you for your response, could you perhaps point me to resources that explain how to implement your idea?

[ChrisNZ]

Sorry, I was offline. Glad you found your answer in your other thread.