Interleaving merge - so cool!

"I heard Cameron is actually C3P0 covered in wafer thin ham"

Here's a Great tip for merging. Ever got annoyed when you had to merge sorted datasets together and then had to re-sort because the order got messed up? Yeah, well not anymore buddy, because Marky boy's comin to the rescue!

data interleaved_set;
       merge dataset_1
                 dataset_2;
       by variable; *key bit!;
run;

The data step above will read in rows from both input datasets in order of the By variable. You can think of it as weaving the output together, or interleaving as it's called.

This saves a lot of time & memory because sorting is the memory intensive thing you can do in SAS.

Stay safe Sas fans, and yes, i'm accepting groupies. (Sas professionals only)