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In releases of SAS prior to SAS 9, the maximum number of variables in a single SAS data set under all operating systems is 32,767, with the exception of Tru64 Unix. The limitations for Tru64 Unix are the same for all releases of SAS (see the limitations under SAS 9 below).

Other than the following limitations that apply to Windows operating systems a SAS data set can be as large as the operating system will allow:

• An observation under Windows cannot be longer than 5MB. Therefore, in a data set containing 32,767 character variables, the longest each variable can be is 160 bytes.
• A SAS data set stored on a drive that is formatted as FAT16 has a file size limit of 2.1 GB.
• A SAS data set stored on a drive that is formatted as FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 GB.
• A SAS data set stored on an NTFS formatted drive, has a file size limit of 2TB.

Beginning in SAS 9, the maximum number of variables allowed is no longer 32,767. For either Windows or Unix platforms the maximum number of variables is limited by the first encountered limitation:

• the observation length
• the total storage possible for names, labels, and metadata
• the amount of available memory on the machine where the data set is stored

You can define a data set with an observation length of up to 2GB on a 32-bit platform and approximately 2*46 on a 64-bit platform.

Assuming a single-byte character set, and that you use the maximum 352 bytes possible for name, label, and so on for each variable, you can have a maximum of about 4,050,000 variables. If the names, labels, and format names are shorter, you can have more than 200,000,000. There is a maximum of 1GB to store all the variable names and other metadata (data set label, compression name, etc).

Assuming the above limits are not exceeded, the maximum possible number of variables on either Windows or Unix is 412,977,617 on 32-bit hosts and 2GB on 64-bit hosts. For z/OS platform the maximum number of variables is primarily limited by the maximum size of a single observation (16MB or 1,677,7216 bytes).

For z/OS the maximum number of observations is 2**31-1 = 2147483647 (2G).

The maximum size of a SAS data set in a Direct Access Bound Library is limited by the maximum size of the library, which is about 2986G bytes on 3390 volumes.

The maximum size of a SAS data set in a USS Library is limited by the maximum number of pages, which is 2**31-1 = 2147483647 = about 2GB. Assuming a fairly typical page size of 32K bytes, the maximum size of the data set would then be about 2**46 by bytes = 64TB. However, larger data sets could be created by specifying a BUFSIZE value larger than 32KB.

Data sets created with SAS 9 on any operating system that contain more than 32,767 variables are not accessible by prior versions.

Operating System and Release Information