Log note when opening a file in SAS 9.4 that was created in SAS Enterprise guide 8

[sasgorilla]

I received a sas7bdat file that was created in SAS Enterprise Guide. When I run a proc contents on the file in SAS 9.4 I see a note in the log that says: 

NOTE: Data file WC000002.Final_data.data is in a format that is native to another host, or the file encoding
does not match the session encoding. Cross Environment Data Access will be used, which might 
require additional CPU resources and might reduce performance. 

Can someone explain what exactly this means, and the implications of this?

Would performance improve from receiving the file in another format (i.e. the original xlsx file) and importing myself? 

For the 10000000+ observations with over 50 variables, the processing time for the proc contents was 

real time (0.15 seconds)

cpu time (0.06 seconds)

[sasgorilla]

Also, I'm not sure this is related but I am seeing a pop up window everytime I run this code that says: 

WARNING: Extra arguments on window command were ignored.

Could this be related? I have had trouble finding what either of these things mean. 

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

This message occurs when the SAS dataset you are reading was created on a different SAS installation to yours, where there is a difference in the OS being used or different SAS encoding settings. You could just ignore the message for small datasets as the performance overhead is likely to be minimal.

That other message you are getting isn't related and you would need to provide more details of what is causing it.

[sasgorilla]

Okay, thanks! 

As for the pop up message, I will have to play around a little more and see if I can detect what is causing it. I'll reply back here if found. 

[Ksharp]

As SASKiwi pointed out , the reason why you get this message is due to the sas dataset(from sas/eg) encoding is different with your sas session.
For example:
your sas session 's encoding is EUC_CN, but sas dataset(from sas/eg) 's encoding is UTF-8 .
Check yours encoding :

%put &=sysencoding. ;



And Check sas dataset(from sas/eg) 's encoding:

proc contents data=sashelp.class;run;