In SAS under Windows, character
values are sorted using the ASCII collating sequence. As an alternative
to the numeric dummy variables discussed previously, you can choose
a character variable with a length of 1 byte to serve the same purpose.
The maximum number of
variables is limited by the first encountered limitation:
-
-
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 bytes on a 64-bit platform. The observation length
cannot exceed the value of the BUFSIZE option.
Assuming a single-byte
character set, and that you use the maximum 352 bytes possible for
name, label, and other data, 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, and other data). The 352 bytes is a result
from 32 bytes for formats, informats and variable names, and 256 bytes
for label values.
Assuming that the above
limits are not exceeded the maximum possible number of variables is
412,977,617 on 32-bit hosts and 2GB on 64-bit hosts.