SAS Essentials: Mastering SAS for Data Analytics, 2nd Edition

3READING, WRITING, AND IMPORTING DATA

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• To be able to work with SAS^® libraries and permanent data sets
• To be able to read and write permanent SAS data sets
• To be able to interactively import data from another program
• To be able to define SAS libraries using program code
• To be able to import data using code
• To be able to discover the contents of an SAS data set
• To be able to understand how the Data Step Reads and Stores Data.

The Era of “Big Data” has arrived. Organizational data sets are growing by leaps and bounds. Institutions, government agencies, and businesses gather information from individual transactions, which can result in hundreds of thousands of data values each day. Whether the data set you are working with has millions of records or a few hundred isn't the point of this chapter. The point is that once you read in your data, you will want to store it in a way that makes it easy to retrieve for analysis. That means that you may want to store more than raw data values. You'll want your data set to include variable names, labels for your variables, manipulations you've done to get it ready for analysis, and other information.

3.1 WORKING WITH SAS LIBRARIES AND PERMANENT DATA SETS

SAS allows you to create permanent data sets that, once created, are easy to access and use. Keep in mind that an SAS data set is different from an SAS program (code) file or a raw data file. The SAS code files, which we used in the previous chapter, contain a listing ...