Hi Margaret,

It would have been helpful to represent both the Data Step cases presented above Visually to demonstrate how the New Dataset is being created ?

So in the first Data Step Case the newds.sas7bdat.lck file also will need to wait for the entire data to be read from testds.sas7bdat and only then it will be committed as a New file ie newds.sas7bdat.Also in this case the Commit need not wait for any deletion of the Input Data set (testds.sas7bdat) because it has a different name. Hence the time for creating the New dataset is less. Am i Right or Wrong? Please advice.

Thanks