SAS ® Performance Tuning Strategies and Techniques

As SAS ® Software becomes increasingly more popular, guidelines for its efficient use are critical. Areas deserving special consideration include program execution, I/O, disk space, and program maintenance. A collection of techniques and sample code are presented to illustrate numerous practical methods for gaining efficiency while using SAS Software. The simplest of requests can fall prey to one or more efficiency violations, such as retaining unwanted datasets in work space, not subsetting early to eliminate undesirable records, or reading wanted as well as unwanted variables. Much of an application’s inefficiency can be avoided with better planning and knowing what works and what does not prior to beginning the coding process. Most people do not plan to fail- they just fail to plan. Fortunately, efficiency gains can be realized by following a few guidelines