Tag: syntax

NOTE: Ampersands Again

My recent post on double and triple ampersands in macros ended with some doubt. Laurie and Dave immediately took up the challenge to resolve the doubt. You can see the whole painful saga in the comments of the original post, but I’ve repeated Dave’s…

NOTE: Getting More for Less With SPDE

Would you like to read or write your data more quickly? SAS V9.1 introduced Scalable Performance Data Engine (SPDE, “Speedy Engine”), for free. Are you using it? Speedy Engine is the little cousin of Speedy Server (Scalable Performance Data Server, a…

NOTE: The Dreaded Double and Triple Ampersands

Aside from Chris Hemedinger’s comment on SAS V9.3’s PROC SQL INTO enhancements, my Macro Arrays, Straight From a Data Set article last week also caught the attention of another friend and regular correspondent – LeRoy Bessler. LeRoy emailed m…

NOTE: SQL INTO, Revisited

In Macro Arrays Straight From a Data Set last week I wrote about using SQL’s INTO in order to create macro variables (and arrays of macro variables) from PROC SQL. I said that we had to use an arbitrarily large number to define the maximum size of the …

NOTE: Macro Arrays, Straight From a Data Set

I love the SAS macro language, and I do a lot of work in it. It’s not uncommon to want to have an array of macro variables with values taken from a data set. Here’s how I most-often do it…

Of course, macro language doesn’t explicitly support array…

NOTE: The OPEN Function (error trapping)

In my previous two posts on this topic (listed at the bottom of this post), I’ve described how to use the OPEN function (and its counterparts) to read data sets from macro code, and to read data sets within a DATA step without using the SET/UPDATE/MODI…

NOTE: Executing a PROC from a DATA Step, Revisited

Further to my post on Executing a PROC from a DATA Step, Quentin commented and drew my attention to a highly informative SAS Global Forum paper on the same subject by Mike Rhoads. I’m grateful to Quentin; Mike’s paper offers a lot of insight and expe…

NOTE: The OPEN Function (reading data sets in macros)

In my previous post on this subject, I showed how to use the DATA step’s OPEN function to get information about data sets and make that information available within a DATA step or as a macro variable. In today’s post I will take it further and show how…