When you specify SORTPGM=BEST
and SAS determines that the database sort utility is not to be used,
SAS uses the value of the SORTCUTP and SORTCUT options to determine
whether to use SyncSort or the SAS sort. If the data set to be sorted
is larger than the number of bytes (or kilobytes or megabytes) that
you specify with SORTCUTP, SyncSort is used instead of the SAS sort
program. The value that you specify must be less than or equal to
2,147,483,647 bytes. If both SORTCUTP and SORTCUT are either not defined
or are set to 0, the SAS sort is used. If you specify both options
and either condition is true, SAS uses SyncSort.
The following equation
computes the number of bytes to be sorted:
number
of bytes= ((length-of-obs) + (length-of-all-keys)) * number-of-obs