Comparison of the BY and CLASS Statements
Using the BY statement is similar to using the CLASS statement and the NWAY option in that PROC MEANS summarizes each BY group as an independent subset of the input data. Therefore, no overall summarization of the input data is available. However, unlike the CLASS statement, the BY statement requires that you previously sort BY variables.
When you use the NWAY option, PROC MEANS might encounter insufficient memory for the summarization of all the class variables. You can move some class variables to the BY statement. For maximum benefit, move class variables to the BY statement that are already sorted or that have the greatest number of unique values.
You can use the CLASS and BY statements together to analyze the data by the levels of class variables within BY groups.
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