Step-by-Step Programming with Base SAS 9.4

Storing Numeric Variables Efficiently

The data sets shown in this section are very small, but data sets are often very large. If you have a large data set, you might need to think about the storage space that your data set occupies. There are ways to save space when you store numeric variables in SAS data sets.

Note: The SAS documentation for your operating environment provides information about storing numeric variables whose values are limited to 1 or 0 in the minimum number of bytes used by SAS (either 2 or 3 bytes, depending on your operating environment).

By default, SAS uses 8 bytes of storage in a data set for each numeric variable. Therefore, storing the variables for each observation in the earlier data set MORETOUR requires 75 bytes: ...