Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond

Overview

So, what is the Output Delivery System? Before SAS 8, procedures and DATA steps produced output that went straight to the listing window (or an LST file or the SYSOUT DD file). With ODS, the procedures and DATA steps simply produce raw data, and ODS supplies the structure and format for the output. For example, if you run a simple PROC CORR to get the correlation coefficient for two variables, ODS could create the HTML output shown on the left in Figure 2.1.

The CORR procedure did not create the tables, formatting, or even the labels for the rows and columns. The CORR procedure simply produced the raw data for the table cells. Figure 2.2 shows this raw data. (Note that Figure 2.2 is a simplification. The data is actually stored as double-precision ...