Large character field sizes in SAS

I am trying to import a large blob field from a MySQL table via SAS ODBC passthrough. The field is larger than the maximum length allowed in SAS. According to SAS 9.2 documentation character type fields can have a maximum length of 32k. Has anyone had experience storing large character fields in SA开发者_如何学GoS? Any suggestions other than the obvious one of breaking it down into smaller substrings?

Thanks Rob

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If you REALLY do need all 32K of that data to operate on, I would import it into more than one column and use arrays to iterate over those columns any time you need to do processing.

See RunSubmit.com for more info.