Your approach is confusing macro logic and SAS code logic.  For example the condition in the your first %IF can never be true for any value of &I since the letter M is never going to match the digit 1. Med&i._1 = 1 If you want more help so a simple example of what variables you have and what new variables you want to create based on the values of those variables. ... View more

@Stat_prevmed wrote: I believe this is because we are deleteing the data in the table before appending, so there should be no observations.   I missed earlier where you posted We are using Proc Append to add data to SQL tables (ODBC connection). So the ODBC connection likely doesn't respond with a number of records. But that raises questions about the status of the ODBC connection as a possible cause of the intermittent behavior. Perhaps something such as network traffic or work load is delaying the transfer of data across the connection. And since you don't show any of the ODBC connection details there could be some other issue related to ODBC and that data source/ target.   ... View more