SAS Certification Prep Guide, 4th Edition

Creating Indexes in the DATA Step

Overview

To create an index at the same time that you create a data set, use the INDEX= data set option in the DATA statement.

General form, DATA statement with the INDEX= option: DATA SAS-data-file-name (INDEX= (index-specification-1</UNIQUE><...index-specification-n> </UNIQUE>)); Here is an explanation of the syntax: SAS-data-file-name is a valid SAS data set name. index-specification for a simple index is the name of the key variable. index-specification for a composite index is (index-name=(variable-1...variable-n)). UNIQUE specifies that values for the key variable must be unique for each observation.

You can create multiple indexes on a single SAS data set. However, ...