Specifies the compression of rows in output tables.
| Valid in: | LIBNAME statement |
| Default: | No |
| Supports: | SAS data set |
specifies that the rows in a newly created table are uncompressed (fixed-length records).
specifies that the rows in a newly created table are 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. |
specifies that the rows in a newly created table are 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. That attribute is used instead of the value that is specified in the COMPRESS= option. This interaction does not apply when you use 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 must be several hundred bytes or larger for effective compression. |