Top 5 SAS BASE Tips

We notilyzed that many of our customers who started out on SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Data Integration Studio are still using SAS BASE for ETL processing. Still solid stuff working seamlessly with SAS Viya Cloud but keep an eye on your resource footprint and develop lean.

In order to keep it clean, all the copyable code can be found on another page. Click HERE for the all the code corresponding to the tips.

1. SAS has loads of OPTIONS to debug your code and limit resource consumption. While developing your first line of code should be:

         Add’s to the SAS log: NOTES, SOURCE plus included statements and macro execution (resolve and trace). The OBS Statement limits the data intake to 1024 records per table. With PROC SQL this can also be set;

         For production you can close most verbose. Error and warning messages will still be logged:

2. Be aware of the 32 character Table/Column name barrier when adding a source (.sas7bdat)

While SAS Developers usually don’t use many words, table or column names in source data (Postgres, SQL database, et cetera) can exceed 32 characters or contain non regular characters for SAS. When connecting these tables they do not appear in the listing of the library. This script will show if this is the case for your source.

3. Work lean and select the columns/variables you actually need (less columns = faster processing) and compress your text datasets

4. Check your resource footprint while developing

Click the button at the top of this page to find the code for this tip!

5. Read ‘The Little SAS Book’ by Lora D. Delwiche and Susan J. Slaughter. Besides Google/ChatGPT, it makes sense for a deeper understanding of the SAS BASEics . . . 😉