Question

I’m running a pretty large query against Oracle database using SAS for windows 9.2. This query is pretty large where in I wrote a sub-query in WITH clause and used it 4 times. This runs fine on SQL PLUS and SQL Developer, but when i run it using SAS, the program hangs up after 20 mins and I can’t even see the log window. I have never worked with SAS and not sure how to proceed but tried following option:

• I created a SAS code file and ran it from windows batch file hoping to get log written to windows file system, but even this runs in-definitely and I don’t see anything written to log file

Can some one direct me here. How can i use ALTLOG command to get log file written to windows file system so that i can understand the exact error message. By the way DBA’s have mentioned that query runs fine and rows are returned from server side, but for some reason SAS program is not able to show this data. I get about 45,000 records from the query.

Thanks

Answer 1

I’ll break it into two points:

1) running an existing Oracle SQL query in SAS without ever using SAS:
best way for you is to embed your Oracle SQL code in so called PROC SQL explicit pass-through:

proc sql;
    connect to oracle as db1 (user=user1 pw=pasw1 path=DB1);
    create table test_table as
    select *
    from connection to db1
        ( /* here we're in oracle */
                  select * from test.table1 where rownum <20 
                )
    ;
    disconnect from db1;
quit;

(borrowed from my answer to another question Limiting results in PROC SQL)
The point is not to try to translate it to SAS SQL (don’t know if you tried or not).

Also make sure you’re creating a SAS table (as in the example) from query result, not writing it to SAS OUTPUT window.

2) Regarding getting the log: the log about an action is in general written once it’s done, so if the query is really running for a long time, you won’t see any intermediate logs.
Anyway, log buffering is the default setting for batch jobs, so log messages are written after the buffer is full.
To get log messages written immediately to the log file set LOGPARM option:

-LOGPARM= “WRITE=IMMEDIATE” 

the opposite option is BUFFERED.

To find out the config file(s) used run following in your SAS session:

proc options option=config;run;

Then enter the option above on separate line in the config file.