This has been very insightful. I will apply your suggestions and update tomorrow.  ... View more

So I imagine that using append will be quite a bit faster then?    If table2 is a file, is that file permanently modified?   The case statement could have been replace with a join by putting the case data into a data set, which I would be comfortable doing with my current skills. Is the a PROC command similar to either a SQL case or join? ... View more

The majority of my programming in SAS has been using PROC SQL. Could you give me an example of what you mean? Would your example replace the UNION and CASE in first example? ... View more

I did see that is was still running according to the progress bar at the bottom. In the past, I have had the progress bar change from "running program blah on..." to something like "running (ready)", but code had not made any apparent progress in two days. Restarting the code showed that it only took one day to run. Given all of this I have been a little suspicious of the progress bar.    I will give the proc contents command and printing a subset a chance tomorrow and let you know.    I appreciate your help with this.   ... View more

I don't think that has been an issue for me before. How do you recommend I view a subset of the table? I'm pretty new to SAS so I apologize if that is a trivial question.   The main reason for my concern is that it seem like my code gets hung during that particular proc sql statement and that the inaccessible table is a sign of a deeper issue that I haven't identified yet.  ... View more

I won't have the computer that is running the query until tomorrow morning, but there wasn't anything that stood out to me in the logs. There was some warning/note about being unable to use compression and a warning that an "&" in the case statement  then values. I have run similar queries without issues before and those warnings/notes were in those logs too.   I will give the proc contents command a chance tomorrow and let you know. I did try: proc sql; select * from folder1.table1; quit; but the SAS EG instance locked up both times that I tried it.    Could it be that I just tried to interact with the file before it was done being written to? I believe that Table2 and Table3 have somewhere around 100 million rows.  ... View more