Date:         Fri, 22 Feb 2002 14:37:12 -0500
Reply-To:     diskin.dennis@KENDLE.COM
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         diskin.dennis@KENDLE.COM
Subject:      Re: disk space issue using SAS
Comments: To: Zhonghe Li <zli@HSPH.HARVARD.EDU>
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Zhonghe,

It's pretty hard to say without investigating what your program is doing
and the detailed code. It's easy to have code that gives correct results
even though it's very inefficient. Then when you get to a crunceher like
California, the inefficiencies come up to haunt you.

In addition to the program logic itself, there are a lot of things that can
chew up disk space in the background. Depending on your system and what
kind of support you have, you might be able to get a techie to monitor the
system disk usage. Other than that, SORTing can use up to three times the
size of the dataset being sorted. PROC SQL is another notorious grabber of
disk space.

I hesitate to say it but, disk space is CHEAP. Your time to figure it out
may be more expensive.

Good luck,
Dennis Diskin




From: Zhonghe Li <zli@HSPH.HARVARD.EDU>@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on 02/22/2002
      02:12 PM

Please respond to Zhonghe Li <zli@HSPH.HARVARD.EDU>

Sent by:  "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>


To:   SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
cc:

Subject:  disk space issue using SAS



Thank you all for answering my question on how to  convert the numeric
variable to date.  It worked.

I have another question about the SAS disk  space.

We wrote macros to run programs for six states and  because of the large
size of California data, we can never finish it.  So  we close SAS after
running the macro for other 5 relatively small states and  then separately
run the state for California, but it still can't  finish.  I know it is
because we don't have enough disk space left for the  program to finish.
So I have two questions here: (1) can some one  explain to me what is going
on behind the program when it is running. It  seems to me that during the
runtime, the program uses a lot disk space but is  not shown anywhere and
therefore can't do anything before closing the session.  (2) Besides buying
more disk space, is there any other way that can work around  the disk
space limit?

Thank you very much.