Date and datetime: accuracy vs storage and I/O costs (SAS)

This post was kindly contributed by Heuristic Andrew » sas - go there to comment and to read the full post.

How much storage space and I/O resources can be saved by using the LENGTH statement to shrink the storage of date and datetimes while maintaining sufficient precision? In my experience, saving I/O generally makes SAS run faster (such as in a DATA step) proportional to the I/O savings, so, for example, a 50% reduction in file size makes SAS run about 50% faster. Continue reading

This post was kindly contributed by Heuristic Andrew » sas - go there to comment and to read the full post.