By default, PROC TABULATE
computes the median using the same methodology as PROC UNIVARIATE.
However, this method uses a lot of resources. If you are working with
very large data sets and computer resources are an issue, you might
want to use an alternate computational method.
The QMETHOD= option
lets you select one of two computational methods for all quantile
statistics. The default is QMETHOD=OS. The
more efficient option is QMETHOD=HIST or QMETHOD=P2,
both of which use a different algorithm to approximate the median.
To see how this option
affects the results, we can compare the output created by using the
default median and the output created by using the code with the addition
of the QMETHOD=HIST ...