RE: SAS program or SAS macro to prepare NonMem ready data

From: david_john.garbutt@pharma.novartis.com Subject: RE: [NMusers] SAS program or SAS macro to prepare NonMem ready data Date: Thu, December 9, 2004 9:53 am Hi, I think the issue is more subtle that this refutation purports to show. The way SAS (in the data step) processes data means that it generally needs an amount of memory proportional to the size of one observation. The same SAS program will run on any size of dataset (the limit is the disk space you have). S-Plus (and other packages keeping data in memory, like minitab ;-)) need memory proportional to the size of the whole dataset. Therefore they will not be able to run a given program for some finite data size. As it happens this critical size is these days larger. But it still exists and it can be a practical problem. And it is therefore a reason to choose SAS over others. regards, Dave Garbutt http://public.xdi.org/=djg