Hi Everyone,

I'm learning how to query a massive Oracle data warehouse through a SAS connection. I'm new to Proc SQL (and to SQL generally), but it seems pretty straightforward and I'm optimistic that I can get up to speed soon. In the meantime, what I'd really like to do is just grab a small chunk of one of these massive databases and take a look at it, to get a better flavor for what's in there than existing documentation is giving me. Plus, as a confidence-building measure, I'd really love to be able to successfully execute a query.

What I'm trying to do right now is grab the first 100 observations (rows) in one of the gigantic Oracle tables. There are about 25 variables (columns) in all, so I'm not trying to do any subsetting. I'm using the following code:

proc sql inobs=100 stimer; create table test as select * from table lib.huge_table; quit;

So far, this has been running for a half-hour or so. I know that big queries take a very long time, and am prepared for that, but it seems to me that just pulling the first 100 rows shouldn't take so long. Am I mistaken about this, or is my code wrong? There's no problem with the Oracle connection itself, in case anyone's wondering.

Thanks very much! -Paul