This is a common question that we’ve encountered in the past during our PoC process.

Question:

I’m using SAS as my BI tool with the ODBC connector.  Performance is really bad but if I use the MySQL command line, it is lightening fast.  Is there some configuration setting I’m missing?

Answer:

Base SAS comes with the ODBC connector.  With Base SAS, the query is satisfied by extracting a huge amount of data from the database, transferring it to the client PC, and then undertaking the analysis there.  It is quite slow.  If you purchase the native MySQL connector from SAS, the product then runs the query against the database, bringing only the final results back.  It is much faster.