Payal, The problem is that you are confusing statistical significance with practical significance.  When you have 1 million observations everything is "significant" because the CI are so small.  P-values are pretty much meaningless with that sample size.  You have to look at the data and determine what is "meaningful". Doc Muhlbaier Duke ... View more

That's exactly what I ended up doing; selecting markets instead of stores.  My sample ended up with 29 stores when I excluded markets with extremely high number of stores.  I think the serpentine sort helped with the market selection that was more distributed in terms of number of stores.  Thank you for your suggestions. ... View more

Reeza - I was able to use the paper you linked and it worked very well.  Here's my code: libname mylib odbc user=xxx password=xxx dsn=DSNNAME insertbuff=32767; proc sql;   create table mylib.trans_test as   select * from work.trans quit; Roughly 13.5 million records were written in 30 minutes.  Much better than what I was getting previously.  Thank you for all your help. ... View more