In reply to V. Kleinhenz.

You have asked excellent questions.

In general, the most efficient plan would read the data once into CAS tables. Viya can read, write, and process data in a distributed fashion, which means that moving to a server that has multiple nodes (or at least multiple cores =(CPUs)) will enable the data to be read in parallel. When you use k cores, the data can be read much faster (up to k times faster), which reduces the time required to read the data. Then (more importantly), you can use CAS-enabled procedures to analyze the data in parallel. In general, analyzing 132M observations and 32 variables should not be a big challenge, although I don't know the details of your process.

To explicitly answer your question, your workflow seems like a good scenario for parallel processing on CAS tables. SAS has videos and web pages where you can learn more about SAS Viya and parallel processing of data. However, I am an analyst/statistician, so my experience with large data-processing projects is limited. To talk to experts, I suggest you start a discussion on the SAS Viya forum at the SAS Support Communities. There are many experts there that have experience with projects like this.