Although many folks who respond about preserve_comments are looking at the code snippet given, in real world situations these SQL statements are often part of SAS macros. To ensure the comments for parallelism get passed, you should try escaping them as follows and compare the run-times to see if it makes a difference, such as:
proc sql;
connect to .... ....readbuff=8000 preserver_comments=Y ..... ;
create work.mytable(compress=yes) as select * from connection to Oracle (
select %str(/)%str(*)+ PARALLEL(4) %str(*)%str(/)
field1, field2, field3, etc.
from oracle_table_source
where abc = blah
);
disconnect from Oracle;
quit;
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