If you were to do this in SAS to create an empty SAS dataset: data mytable; run; It would actually create a dataset with one row. The data step cycles through once, hits the end (run), outputs a row, then comes back and finds it has no more rows to process so it stops. To [...]
SAS has a really neat function called intnx, which will increment a date to the next of an interval. For example, if you have a date (any date. maybe the current date?), you can get the date of the first day of the next month by doing this: data _null_; d = ’11JUN2011′d; format d [...]
The hard way to remove a label in SAS is to list out all of the labels one-by-one, like this data mylib.mydataset; set mylib.mydataset; label varA=”; label varB=”; label varC=”; run; But if you don’t know all of the variables ahead of time, or just want something cleaner/faster, you can do this proc datasets library=mylib [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
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 [...]
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.; format now date7.; put [...]