Can SAS "skip" directly to a desired record? On OS/390, I'd give a qualified "yes", if you are processing a file with RECFM=FBS. (the "S" indicating "Standard", i.e., no truncated blocks; in this context, "S" does *not* mean "Spanned")

Using SAS 8.1 on OS/390 2.9, on an HDS Pilot 27 (equivalent to an IBM 9672 R25)...

Consider the following program, in which we attempt to skip the first 100,000 records. Each record is 175 bytes. There are two pairs of INFILE/INPUT statements: * pair 1 uses RECFM=N, to access the file as a binary stream * pair 2 uses FIRSTOBS

(I commented out one pair for each run.)

//FOODOG DD DSN=DBAT.D1480301.ADDRESSB,DISP=SHR //SYSIN DD * DATA _NULL_; /* pair 1 */ INFILE FOODOG RECFM=N ; INPUT @17500001 FOODOG $CHAR175.; /* pair 2 */ *INFILE FOODOG FIRSTOBS=100001; *INPUT @1 FOODOG $CHAR175.; PUT '----+----0'; PUT _INFILE_; STOP; RUN;

INFILE/INPUT method: #records skipped CPU time of SAS step -------------------- ---------------- -------------------- RECFM=N; INPUT @1750001 10,000 0.22 sec FIRSTOBS=10001 10,000 0.25 sec RECFM=N; INPUT @17500001 100,000 0.22 sec FIRSTOBS=100001 100,000 0.42 sec

Based on the fact that the "RECFM=N" program takes the same amount of CPU to skip 10,000 and 100,000 records, I'm tempted to infer that SAS is going directly to the desired record, and not reading/discarding prior records. (I admit, I haven't checked SMF data to confirm that.)

The downside is that "RECFM=N" implies UNBUFFERED (no read ahead) processing, so it's not necessarily a good solution to Fred Gehm's appliction. [Of course, YMMV, based on LRECL, BLKSIZE, and the "smarts" of your disk subsystem, which may be capable of recognizing that your application is doing sequential access, and might start prefetching data into cache.] But I just wanted to point that it appears that SAS can go directly to a desired record.