Efficiently Trim Character Variable Lengths to Fit Data, Reduce Dataset Size
Wayne Zhong · 2012
In environments where saving datasets with the (COMPRESS=yes) option is not permitted, unnecessarily large datasets clog up hard drives and increase processing time, costing patience and efficiency alike. Somewhere between the extremes of simply defaulting character variables to 200 characters or spending time to manually set lengths - risking truncation when data updates - there is a happy middle ground to automate the process: always let the length be as short as it can without truncation.