Hi everyone. So, there is a bit of disagreement in my work unit regarding the effectiveness of using OPTIONS COMPRESS=YES in order to speed up SAS code. I would like to get some expert opinions to try to resolve this discussion. Obviously, when using data which is stored on disk, compression is a good idea, because often the performance bottleneck is I/O related. So, reading and writing a compressed dataset is a good idea. There's no contention about that. But does compression speed up the performance of DATA/PROC steps when the dataset has already been loaded into memory? I don't see how compression could speed performance up in this case, and in fact it seems to me that a compressed in-memory dataset would actually slow down SAS procedures because of the extra processing step required to decompress. So, to clarify, consider the following two code blocks: Example 1: ======== options compress = yes; data work.d1; var1 = var2 * var3; run; proc freq data = work.d1; table var1; run; Example 2: ======== options compress = no; data work.d1; var1 = var2 * var3; run; proc freq data = work.d1; table var1; run; Will example 1 run any faster than example 2 because of OPTIONS COMPRESS=YES? Thanks everyone for your time.
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