Re: large data sets (was st: A faster way to gsort)

[Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net>]

On 3/13/2014 10:44 PM, Joseph Coveney wrote:
> It sounds like you're pulling modest-to-large result sets out of the database,
> saving them as SAS dataset files and then going back and sort-merging them via
> PROC SQL with multigigabyte-sized result sets likewise pulled out of the
> database en passant--a situation that even SAS aficionados recommend avoiding in
> favor of pass-through queries.
I have not being doing that, but it is what the SAS analysts in this 
environment do - and it's one reason they prefer not to use Stata. I do 
as much as I can in native SQL, and then roll the results up in Stata. 
But this requires iterating queries over eg calendar year to ensure that 
the results I pull down are manageably small.
But the first point is an important one - my primary role here is not 
data analyst, mostly there are other analysts using SAS to create 
datasets that I can analyze in Stata. And it is likely to stay that way 
as long as SAS has the edge on data management using large databases.
cheers,
Jeph
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