I don't know SAS, so I can't comment on that part, but Sybase also as a BCP utility program (and associated library calls - I don't know whether DBI gives you access to them). If you have lots of data, you might want to use BCP to get the data out of Sybase. BCP extracts or load complete tables, IIRC, but you can always create a temporary table with your query, and BCP that out.

Whether this will be faster, I cannot judge, but it's something you might want to consider.

Abigail