You should make sure
you thoroughly understand the material about the SAS library model
in
SAS Language Reference: Concepts before you attempt to tune SAS applications and servers
at your installation. Here are some of the terms defined in that material
that are most important to understanding this paper:
A SAS library can have
five types of members, DATA, VIEW, CATALOG, PROGRAM, ACCESS, MDDB,
and FDB. This paper will deal only with the types DATA, VIEW, and
CATALOG.
A library member of
type DATA is a SAS data file. Through SAS 5, SAS referred to such
files as SAS data sets. A SAS data file can be compressed, and it
can have zero or more indexes.
A SAS data view is a
set of directions that tells a SAS view engine how to combine data
from one or more sources into observations.
A SAS catalog is a file
that contains smaller files; the files contained in a catalog are
catalog entries. Some types of entries you might be familiar with
are PROGRAM (
SAS/AF programs),
SCREEN (PROC FSEDIT screens), and FORMAT (user-written formats).