I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want to speed up your application, don't look at your code, look at your data access. The two slowest things you can do in application development are ...

The DICTIONARY tables component is specified in the FROM clause of a SELECT statement. DICTIONARY is a reserved libref for use only in PROC SQL. Data from DICTIONARY tables are generated at run time.

proc sql; create table proclib.paylist (IdNum char(4), Gender char(1), Jobcode char(3), Salary num, Birth num informat=date7. format=date7., Hired num informat=date7 ...