Hi,

I am trying to run a big merge. I have about 20 files with varying record lengths and quantities. Some files have a record length of only 20 bytes whereas other files are over 1000 bytes wide. Quantities vary from 5 million to 140 million. The final output file will be over 5000 bytes wide and will have 140 million records. This process has to run weekly. I am running SAS 9 on the mainframe.

I did run a test with just 6 of the files but the job took too much CPU time, too much work space and ran for 13.5 hours, which is too long. I ran the same merge using views and that helped with the work space. Also the job ran in 7.5 hours,which is better but still too long and it still takes over 1 hour of CPU time which is not acceptable in our production environment, especially on a weekly basis.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Amrita Singh