COMPRESS= LIBNAME Statement Option
Specifies the compression of rows in output tables.
| Valid in: |
LIBNAME statement |
| Default: |
No |
| Supports: |
SAS data set |
Syntax
COMPRESS=NO | YES | CHAR | BINARY
Syntax Description
- NO
-
specifies that the
rows in a newly created table be uncompressed (fixed-length records).
- YES | CHAR
-
specifies that the
rows in a newly created table be compressed (variable-length records)
using RLE (Run Length Encoding). RLE compresses rows by reducing repeated
consecutive characters (including blanks) to two-byte or three-byte
representations.
Tip:Use this compression algorithm for character data.
- BINARY
-
specifies that the
rows in a newly created table be compressed (variable-length records)
using RDC (Ross Data Compression). RDC combines run-length encoding
and sliding-window compression to compress the file.
Interaction:For the COPY procedure, the default value CLONE
uses the compression attribute from the input data set for the output
data set instead of the value specified on the COMPRESS= option. This
interaction does not apply when using SAS/SHARE or SAS/CONNECT.
Tip:This method is highly effective for compressing medium
to large (several hundred bytes or larger) blocks of binary data (numeric
columns). Because the compression function operates on a single record
at a time, the record length needs to be several hundred bytes or
larger for effective compression.