BULKUNLOAD= LIBNAME Statement Option

Rapidly retrieves (fetches) a large number of rows from an external data set.

Valid in: SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME statement
Categories: Bulk Loading
Data Set Control
Default: NO
Restriction: Netezza: To specify BULKUNLOAD=YES for Netezza, you must be the Netezza admin user, or you must have Create External Table permission.
Data source: Amazon Redshift, Aster, Google BigQuery, Informix, Netezza, Snowflake, Spark, Yellowbrick
Notes: Support for Google BigQuery and Yellowbrick was added in SAS 9.4M7.
Support for Informix and Spark was added in SAS 9.4M9.
See: BULKUNLOAD= data set option, BULKLOAD= LIBNAME option, Netezza bulk unloading, Aster bulk unloading

Table of Contents

Syntax

BULKUNLOAD=YES | NO

Syntax Description

YES

calls the Remote External Table interface to retrieve data from the server.

NO

uses standard result sets to retrieve data from the DBMS.

Details

Using BULKUNLOAD=YES is the fastest way to retrieve large numbers of rows from an external table.

Amazon Redshift: This option calls the Amazon Redshift UNLOAD command to retrieve data from an Amazon Redshift DBMS.

Aster: This option uses the Aster client tool, ncluster_export, to retrieve data from the Aster DBMS.

Google BigQuery: This option calls the Google BigQuery Extractor API.

Informix: This option calls the DBACCESS utility to unload data from Informix.

Netezza: This option calls the Netezza Remote External Table interface to retrieve data from the Performance Server.

Yellowbrick: This option calls the YBUNLOAD utility.

Last updated: February 3, 2026