@LinusH,   If Hadoop's performance is slow, then it might make sense to have a local copy of some sort.  However, HDFS data cannot be read by SAS, so it does not make sense, in my opinion, to just copy the HDFS file to one's local machine.     Some ideas that might make sense: Use SAS and the Hadoop Libname engine to copy the Hadoop table into a local SAS dataset or table.  This is the best option in terms of performance and convenience with SAS. Export the HDFS data from Hadoop into a csv or other delimited file and then copy the csv file to one's local machine.  I think this makes less sense because one then has to re-import the data into SAS, but this would at least work.  Trying to read raw HDFS data locally without a local Hadoop instance will not work at all. Jim ... View more

Just want to add, if you create a csv file, that hasn't to be moved to your local SAS server. You can use FILENAME HADOOP to access the file in hdfs. PROC HADOOP let you submit hdfs commands or exxecute pig programs which can come in handy when converting the parquet file. None of these require a separate SAS/ACCESS licence. ... View more