SAS Coding: 3 Data Set Tricks in PROC SQL

Maybe you are like me and your SAS programs frequently bounce from PROC SQL to data steps depending on the task at hand. Some things you cannot do in PROC SQL as easily as the data step and vice versa.  Here’s 3 data set tricks that I have successfully used with PROC SQL.  These are some time savers that you can use in your work.  However, if you know some others add them in the Comments section – I double-dare you.   Trick #1: Drop and Keep Options You can use the DROP and KEEP options on the FROM or CREATE statements. This is handy when you want to exclude or include a list of variables.  Consider this example where I saved myself some typing because I know the only variable I don’t want is country. Otherwise I would have had to type out all of the other variables just to exclude a single one. proc sql; create table Newtable  as    select * from sashelp.prdsal2(drop=country);quit;  Trick #2: Limit the Observations OBS allows you to control the number of observations input to the procedure.  I would use this if I had a particularly large data table and I just needed to test […]

Second Birthday

It’s PlatformAdmin.com’s 2nd birthday this week! The past 2 years have gone very quickly I must say. I set out with a goal of writing a least 1 post every month. Not very ambitious I know, but realistic for me nonetheless! I’ve never …

Example 9.26: More circular plotting

SAS’s Rick Wicklin showed a simple loess smoother for the temperature data we showed here. Then he came back with a better approach that does away with edge effects. Rick’s smoothing was calculated and plotted on a cartesian plane. In this entry we’…

SAS & IWA: Reviewing SPNs

My last post was about configuring additional Service Principal Names (SPNs) in Active Directory to support the use of Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) in a SAS® platform installation that uses host name aliases in preference to physical ho…