Hello, I've made some tests for merging 2 tables (inner join), one having around 13 million observations, and the other one with 300.000, and I have received the following time results, within the 3 different scenarios: 1) PROC SQL -> 20 minutes; 2) MERGE with sort on BY variable -> 1h and a half including sorting on tables; 3) MERGE with indexes on BY variable (no sorting) -> 30 hours. So my questions are: - Why PROC SQL is more efficient than MERGE; - Why MERGE without a previous sort is 30 times more time consuming than MERGE with sort. I know that sorting is reccomended before merge, but the performance decrease is really significant in this case. I would appreciate your answers very much, thanks a lot.
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