Arrrrggghh! SAS is Evil!
Just another day (or two) of torturing data. Like I mentioned a couple of days ago, a week back I decided to update a data set to include the last year or so of data (the data sources I use were recently updated). Like most "simple" jobs, it's turned out to be much more of a hairball than I expected. Although the program I used was fairly simple to rewrite, I realized that I had to update not one, not tWo, but THREE datasets in order to bring everything up to the present. Caution: SAS Geekspeak ahead One of the data sets is pretty large (it was about 70 gigabytes, but with the updates and indexing I've done, it's almost 100 gig). So, adding the new data and checking it took quite a while (no matter how efficiently you code things, SAS simply takes a long time to read a 70 gigabyte file). I thought I had everything done except for the final step. Unfortunately, the program kept crashing due to "insufficient resources." For the unitiated, when ...