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Tag Archives: SAS

Abusing Hash objects as a Stack in SAS Data Step

Everyone in the computer science field (should) eventually learn or realize that any recursive function can be rewritten as an iterative process with the aid of a stack. Since a SAS Data Step is iterative, it’s fairly easy to look up children of a tree node in metadata, but nearly impossible to recursively look up [...]

Looping through SAS metadata objects

The following is my attempt at SAS Golf, where in a Data Step, I try to list the associations of a metadata object to the log. This is basically just taking advantage of combining SAS for loops with SAS while loops. I thought it was cool. Usually I find myself doing this with metadata_getnasn, metadata_getnprp, [...]

Dramatically Increasing SAS DI Studio performance of SCD Type-2 Loader Transforms

In SAS DI Studio 3.4 (and I imagine in future versions), the prepackaged code for the SCD Type-2 Loader works like this: Does the dataset exist? If not, create an empty dataset with structure and indexes as defined from metadata. Then detect differences between it and the source dataset and the target dataset, expire any [...]

Easy Inserting/Appending Libraries into FMTSEARCH path lists in SAS 9.2

In SAS 9.1.3 and prior, Options list (such as FMTSEARCH for libraries with format catalogs, and SASAUTOS for paths that contain macros shared across jobs) were annoying to work with. If you have nested code that wants to add a library or a path the list, doing so like this could potentially clobber statements executed [...]

Counting distinct variables in SQL with SAS

One way to get the count of distinct variables, which works in most flavors of SQL, is to use a subquery. For instance, in Oracle this is:
SELECT count(SELECT DISTINCT foo FROM table) FROM dual
In SAS, using PROC SQL, you can do that too, but you can also simply do this:
SELECT count(distinct foo) FROM table

For loops in SAS

When coding for loops in SAS, one neat thing to remember is that all of the parts of it are optional.
start <TO stop> <BY increment> <WHILE(expression) | UNTIL(expression)>
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/62618/HTML/default/a000201276.htm
So in another language, what might be
for(int i=0;i < max;i++) {
In SAS, you can leave out the “by 1″, since it’s the default increment. So this would be
do [...]

Removing formats from all variables in a SAS Dataset

In SAS, every field/variable in a table/dataset can be given a format. This format tells SAS how to display the data. The following datastep will create a table called “formatted” having 1 row containing 3 variables: x, y, and d.
data formatted;
x=9000;
y=42;
now=16761;
format x comma6.;
format y dollar5.;
[...]

Converting between Date and Datetime in SAS

In SAS, fields are either character of varying length, or numeric. No exceptions. Temporal values such as Date and Date/Time are stored as either the number of days or seconds since 1960 January 1st.
In order to convert from Date/Time to Date, and from Date to Date/Time, you could divide or multiply respectively by 86400 (the [...]

Installing SAS 9.1.3 on Ubuntu Linux 8.10

It works. Just follow the instructions.

Installing SAS 9.1.3 on OpenBSD 4.3

It does not work.