Not sure this is the right forum as there doesn't appear to be a "general" forum... I know this sounds like an odd subject but the reason I ask is money. Setting up a server with SAS for the first year is quite expensive (more than $75k--I've received a quote). That isn't something that my new company really wants to spend their money given it would only be used by a handful of folks. At a previous employer we had both SAS on desktops and on a server. I did everything on the desktop and used a remote connection to connect to my desktop at work. The data we use where I am now is decent in size but frankly it is not typically larger than 20 million lines and maybe 20 variables (numeric, some text but not long in length). We do some sorting, merging, etc. but if we were to optimize some of the processing we could probably improve the efficiency. My question is has anyone done something like this? Just got a big desktop, get a ton of memory, get the large drives, etc. and then run PC SAS on it. Is there a hardware "limit" after which PC SAS won't work? My thought is that the 4-5 PC licenses that we need combined with one new big desktop would be much more inexpensive than setting up a server, loading SAS, etc.
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