Per LinusH, its dependant on a lot of things.  I would also add that joing big table to small means that the big one is copied over and then small is updated to the big table.  Whereas small to big would mean that new rows are inserted each time into small to bulk the dataset up.  Therefore the read/write on the small to big would be bigger.  Also, maybe try taking the where clause out and seeing the difference.  A couple of other tips which may help: from bigtable as a right join  smalltable as b on a.columnname = b.columnname and a.date=''; Shouldn't make too much impact but you never know. Also could try sub-querying to shrink the data: from (select dummy from bigtable) a   /* Any other restriction you can think of? */ right join (select * from smalltable where date='') b on  a.columnname=b.columnname; ... View more

Hi, So what is it your trying to achieve?  You can pass a delimited list of data in as User24feb has mentioned.  There is also another syntax for parmbuff which you can pass any number of parameters in.  You could also generate the code which is my preference. data have;      client="ABC"; output;      client="BBD"; output; run; data _null_;      set have;      call execute('%Links('||strip(client)||');');   /* Creates a macro call for each row of dataset */ run; Without knowing exactly what you want to achieve though its hard to provide concrete examples. ... View more

Personally I would just generate the code from the metadata: data _null_;      set sashelp.vtable (where=(libname="YOUR_LIBNAME"));      /* for each row returned do */          call execute('data your_libname.'||strip(memname)||';                               set your_libname.'||strip(memname)||';                               date1_mod=input(put(date1,8.),yymmdd8.);                               format...;                           run;   /* Note you could put further code after here like your proc sql */'); run; Using the above methodology (or you could use macro), you can create complex large programs with very little starting information. ... View more

And, principally as I don't like formats: data countries;      length code $2 decode $200;      code="AU"; decode="Austria"; output;      code="UK"; decode="United Kingdom"; output; ... run; proc sql;      create table WANT as      select     BASE.*,                     (select distinct THIS.DECODE from COUNTRIES THIS where THIS.CODE=BASE.CODE)                          as COUNTRY      from          HAVE BASE; quit; You could also do the above by left joining the country data onto the base table. ... View more

Not sure what the question is, yes you could create a function to do something like that using fcmp.  TBH I don't see the value in it though, just use an if or select construct. ... View more