How to improve the performance of SAS Enterprise Guide 4

Question

I have a table with almost 200,000,000 records. It takes a long long time to query.

Any idea about improving the performance?

Answer 1

Consider adding index on id-type columns in that table.

BTW, this has nothing to do with SAS EG performance, but everything to do with the underlying BASE SAS engine.

Answer 2

In addition to indexing you should also consider:

1. Compression. When you build the dataset make sure you use the compress=yes option if you're not already. This will shrink the size of the table on disk resulting in less disk I/O (the slowest part of querying).
2. Check column lengths - make sure you're not using a field length of $255 to store something that only needs a length of $20 etc...
3. Use the SAS SPDE (Scalable Performance Data Engine). It allows you to partition your SAS datasets into multiple files and optionally spread them across different disks. Once your SAS datasets reach a certain size you can see performance improvements. I generally tend to use SPD libnames any time a dataset grows > 10G. No additional SAS modules are requires - this is enabled as part of Base SAS.