@Kow For such high volumes, I would very seriously consider storing the data using the SPDE engine and binary compression, rather than the V9 engine.
Here is a graph taken from
https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-SAS-Coding-Christian-Graffeuille/dp/1512397490
that shows how powerful the SPDE binary compression is.
Test case #1 uses all variables with the exact same values. That's the only case where the V9 engine approaches the efficiency of the SPDE engine, but it is a totally unrealistic case. For every other data pattern, the SPDE copmpression stays at around 90% compression rate, which is incredibly good. The last case (#8) is for a table with only one numeric variable and all observations are different, and SPDE still manages a compression ratio greater than 50%.
Your processing times should drop too.
To go back to the question about numeric lengths, note that tests #2 and #7 are the same except that #2 uses numeric variables with length=8 while #7 uses length=3.
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