Good Afternoon, I am new to SAS and SAS communities! I have been trying to understand The best/most efficient way to query data from our MS SQL Server. Currently I am using SAS Access for ODBC Here are my Observations: Option #1: If I use the query builder in a process flow and drag in two libraries, join them and retrieve a couple of columns from each, I see four threads open on my sql server - two per table. While I don't like this, I expect it and know that is the behaviour. If I then add a filter to my query and hit run again, it opens four new threads!! I was unaware of this. Option #2: If I use a proc sql; statement and write the query manually, I reduce the number of threads to two. This is a plus. Apparently proc sql commands use a cursor which means I lose all of the caching/performance benefits of multi-threaded reads and SAS caching. My questions are: 1> Is the SAS/ACCESS Interface to Microsoft SQL Server a better solution?? Better performance, fewer threads etc. 2> Is there a different SAS code option like proc sql on steroids?? I can change the user properties that SAS is using to kill the client thread after a smaller amount of inactivity but this seems like a poor use of resources on the part of the SASAPP server? Thanks for any opinions/insights/feedback etc. Shawn ... View more