I agree. Generally, the symbol tables are contained in memory, but once those limits are reached the values are written to disk, so your limits are constrained by your operating environment and not by SAS. However, just because you could doesn't mean that you should. I find that there are more efficient methods of processing data without creating several million macro variables. ... View more

And I think that the performance difference would only be noticeable (if ever) when processing millions+ observations. ... View more

In an earlier post, you mentioned that if a sale has been made but the account_no has not been created yet that the account_no should be blank. The SQL i wrote has an outer join (left join) so that if there are no matching account numbers they would be blank. For those records with a missing account_no, have you confirmed that the meter has a valid match on the b table? ... View more

Here's my third attempt to get you to try this. Trust me. It works. I modified it to use the data structure of your last post, but the concept is the same as the other 2 times I offered this solution. data A; infile cards; input accountno meter_number finaldatecombined ddmmyy10. saleid $; format finaldatecombined ddmmyy10.; cards; 80000 55393810 11/06/2011 FX111 ; run; data B; infile cards; input accountno meter_number invoice_date ddmmyy10.; format invoice_date ddmmyy10.; cards; 31000 55393810 04/10/2011 39000 55393810 24/10/2011 ; run; proc sql; create table identifyaccno as select    b.accountno,    a.meter_number,    a.finaldatecombined,    b.invoice_date,    a.saleid from    a    left join    b    on         a.meter_number = b.meter_number and       b.invoice_date = (select min( invoice_date )                      from                         b                      where                         b.invoice_date > a.finaldatecombined ) ; quit; ... View more

I've used proc append successfully to add more data to an existing Access table. Here's an example: * create a new access database; proc export data=sashelp.class    table=class    dbms=access2007 replace;    database='c:\data\test.accdb'; run; libname myaccdb 'c:\data\test.accdb'; * append more data to existing table; proc append base=myaccdb.class data=sashelp.class; run; libname myaccdb clear; ... View more

Try this: %let group=country state city; %let group1=%sysfunc( tranwrd( &group, %str( ),%str(,) )); %put &group1; ... View more

I was wrong. Just tested it myself. Getnames always gets the variable names from the first row. ... View more