Dear SAS-L

I have a large or medium sized dataset with 13m obs and 4 vars, 2 being numeric ids - one unique id and one batch id. Size is about 700mb. Unfortunately its not correctly sorted and I need to transpose the dataset and so the transpose is failing. I'm sorting it now - hopefully it won't take too long on this toy pc (1GB ram WinXP)... there you go 25 mins, but would a hash sort have made a noticable difference? I figure the time it would take me to get one working I may as well sort it using proc sort, but:-

1) would the hash fit in memory? (The text vars are 3 char - the transpose id variable - and about 600 chars - the transpose var; By is by the batch id) 2) what performance gains might I expect, though of course I realise my mileage may vary - isn't the majority of the work I/O? 3) I'm guessing there's no such thing as a hash transpose :)

Any comments much appreciated,

Rgds.