POINTOBS= Table Option

Specifies whether SAS creates compressed data sets whose observations can be randomly accessed or sequentially accessed.

Category: Table Control
Restriction: Use with output tables only.
Interaction: Used with COMPRESS= table option
Data source: SAS data set
Syntax
Syntax Description
Details
See Also

Syntax

POINTOBS= YES | NO

Syntax Description

YES

causes the FedSQL language to produce a compressed data set that might be randomly accessed by observation number. This is the default.

Here are examples of accessing data directly by observation number:
  • the POINT= option of the MODIFY and SET statements in the DATA step
  • going directly to a specific observation number with PROC FSEDIT.
    Tip
    Specifying POINTOBS=YES does not affect the efficiency of retrieving information from a data set. It does increase CPU usage by approximately 10% when creating a compressed data set and when updating or adding information to it.

NO

suppresses the ability to randomly access observations in a compressed data set by observation number.

Tip
Specifying POINTOBS=NO is desirable for applications where the ability to point directly to an observation by number within a compressed data set is not important. If you do not need to access data by observation number, then you can improve performance by approximately 10% by specifying POINTOBS=NO:
  • when creating a compressed data set
  • when updating or adding observations to it

Details

Note that REUSE=YES takes precedence over POINTOBS=YES. For example:
create table test{options compress=yes pointobs=yes reuse=yes};
This example code results in a data set that has POINTOBS=NO. Because POINTOBS=YES is the default when you use compression, REUSE=YES causes POINTOBS= to change to NO.

See Also

Table Options:
COMPRESS= Table Option
REUSE= Table Option
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Last updated: February 23, 2017