Chapter 1: Using SAS in a Data Mart, Data Lake, or Data Warehouse
The purpose of this chapter is to showcase how SAS has been used in data warehousing over its lifetime, and how that history impacts SAS data warehousing today. It provides an opportunity to see how slight changes in coding in SAS data steps can greatly impact data input/output (I/O). It also covers how SAS data is managed, and how Base SAS, the analytic component, interacts with stored data.
As SAS developed, there became a need to set indexes on variables, and to use SQL coding in SAS. How PROC SQL in SAS compares with data steps and other SQL programming will be reviewed in this chapter. I will also explain strategies to deal with memory issues in SAS, and how it has evolved to now be used with data in the cloud.
In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:
How early versions of SAS handled data
Different ways to access data in SAS
Considerations in improving I/O in SAS
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