LONG REPLY: Thank you to both Jaap & Ronan for your suggestions and responses. The person who is acting as our administrator is out for today. So I thought I would take the opportunity to specify the exact issue I am up against. Background: I have been hard-core using SAS for a little over one year now. Previously I had tinkered with changing macros and running basic processes. But now I am "in the game" and enjoying it. A few months ago I performed some very memory intensive proc sqls for my work. Some of the procedures took around eight hours to run overnight. When we purchased SAS we did so in a way that it resides on its own server. So we purchased a new server to go with it as well. We worked with an agency that was going to act as our SAS administrator for the purposes of installation and technical support. We do not have a full time IT-specialist devoted to SAS administration over here. But I am working with one of my fellow co-workers who speaks the IT nomenclature- at least much better than I ever could. We are now faced with a situation where I do not fully know or understand our status with the company that originally was to provide administrative support. This is due to varying circumstances. People I report to have suggested that both I and the IT support person work directly with SAS in figuring things out, but I am not entirely sure if we will inevitably have to partner with someone or an organization that would provide full support. Back onto the issue of "full support..." We currently have a few tasks ahead of us. One is regarding the issue I originally wrote this e-mail about. We also are in the beginning stages of two other initiatives: (1) figure how to build a system of Disaster Recovery (DR) for testing our updates, and (2) Start updating our SAS versions - we have not done anything of this sort in a year. And back onto the immediate issue... The SAS server we use here has the program installed on it. We also have our data files and syntax files stored on this server as well. This is for both Enterprise Guide as well as Enterprise Miner. I think we are starting to get a decent handle on defining libraries within our Management Console instead of via syntax. When the SAS Server was created it was somehow partitioned to have data files stored in part of it and other types of files (maybe code or installed software & drivers, etc.) stored in another partition. When I first ran my program it very much spiked in using hard-disk space in the middle of the night for creating temporary files, so ultimately it did not run. So my handy IT-person was able to adjust the partition so that 80% was devoted to data rather than 50% - or something like that. The program ran, and it provided good/useful results, but we do not believe this is a good long-term solution. Rather than having the data files be stored on the SAS Server our thinking was why don't we store our data files (both temporary & permanent) on our regular company servers where we have more than enough space and procedures for backing things up already in place. I feel confident that this is probably easy to do, and probably the right thing to do, but... that is why I am writing into Communities. Maybe the ultimate solution is to add physical memory to the SAS Server, but what do I know? Thank you very much in advance for your help. And I am very open to any suggestions that anyone has regarding how to do things correctly and efficiently.
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