Question

I’m running the following SAS command:

Proc SQL;
Delete From Server003.CustomerList;
Quit;

Which is taking over 8 minutes… when it takes only a few seconds to read that file. What could be cause a delete to take so long and what can I do to make it go faster?

(I do not have access to drop the table, so I can only delete all rows)

Thanks,

Dan

Edit: I also apparently cannot Truncate tables.

Answer 1

This is NOT regular SQL. SAS’ Proc SQL does not support the Truncate statement. Ideally, you want to figure out what’s going on with the performance of the delete from; but if what you really need is truncate functionality, you could always just use pure SAS and not mess with SQL at all.

data Server003.CustomerList;
set Server003.CustomerList (obs=0);
run;

This effectively performs and operates like a Truncate would. It maintains the dataset/table structure but fails to populate it with data (due to the OBS= option).