Chapter 9: Reading and Writing SAS Data Sets
What’s a SAS Data Set?
Besides reading raw data from text files, SAS can also read and write data from SAS data sets. Once you have created a SAS data set from raw data or you have been given a SAS data set, you are ready to run SAS procedures to analyze your data or to write a DATA step to create new variables or to further manipulate your data.
A SAS data set actually contains two parts: One is called the data descriptor, and the other is the data itself. The data descriptor contains your variable names, whether a variable is stored as character or numeric (the only two types allowed in a SAS data set), how many bytes of storage are used to store a variable, and other information about how to display ...
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