I wrote a paper at the end of the previous century with a macro to show the differences.   SUGI 23: %COMPARWS: Compare with Summary: A Macro Using Proc Compare   www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi23/Posters/p170.pdf   sas.community.org has a zip with the programs   http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Macro_ComparWS_Compare_with_summary   The above assumes that both data sets have the same keys.   I wrote another macro which identifies the adds, changes, and deletes.   http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Macro_Extract   Ron Fehd  ... View more

keep a Daily Job Diary.   1. your DJD is the key to being able to accurately guesstimate how much time you will spend on a project in the future.   2. a regular analysis at end.of (day or week) will keep you on track; e.g.: "Just how far off track are you willing to go in this new&improved work-around?"   3. a list of accomplishments is invaluable in your quarterly/semi-annual/annual personal evaluation   ... View more

Tom has covered the basics; this page has several examples: http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Do_which_loop_until_or_while ... View more

The problem is that SAS is building a large sparse matrix for the results. For your case where lower vars are exclusive this means using more memory than needed.   This paper discusses how to concatenate all vars in the x-tab into one character variable to reduce time.   Summarizing Impossibly Large SAS Data Sets for the Data Warehouse Server Using Horizontal Summarization   Michael A. Raithel   SUGI 2000 http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi25/25/sy/25p290.pdf ... View more

I agree with the majority * post-processing --- log-saving and reading/scraping --- is much easier * do not add trivial code to every step, * stick with "Keep it Simple" Got Cleverness?  keep it in the Bricolage folder! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Programming_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#Information_technology The Bricoleur: Bricolage, Bricoleur: What is It? ... View more

non-trivial because it involves inserting your error-text-capture into all your programs. %macro run_capture(step=0); DATA this_message;      attrib step           length = 4             date_time      length = 8             sys_error_text length = $128; step           = &step; datetime       = datetime(); sys_error_text = "&syserrortext"; output; stop; PROC append base = list_sys_errors             data = &syslast; run; %mend; As you can see, the task is to replace all your run statements with the macro call %run_capture(step=N) Someone will suggest adding a global macro variable that the macro increments. So then figure out in which step the error occurs based on a global macro variable value. hth  $0.02 ... View more