As you have learned,
there is no single set of programming techniques that is most efficient
or appropriate in all situations. However, if reducing execution time
is an important consideration in your computing environment, one way
of achieving that goal is to reduce the number of times SAS has to
read from or write to the storage medium.
In
this chapter you learn to use options and a statement to control the
size and number of data buffers, which in turn can affect your programs'
execution times by reducing the number of I/O operations that SAS
must perform.