We started off this chapter by exploring the concept of views. We discussed multiple advantages of views, including their core strengths of protecting sensitive information, easing the coding process, and giving us the ability to use the most recent version of the source data. Apart from these core advantages, we also explored how views can help optimize queries. Manipulating data was also a central theme of this chapter as we looked at deleting columns and rows, modifying columns, and adding columns. We also looked at the identification of duplicates as part of manipulating data. Here, we compared Proc SQL to the common deduplication technique of Proc SORT and also explored the not-so-common use of the SUMMARY procedure for this task.
While we covered indexes as a topic previously in this book, we looked at creating, controlling, monitoring, and deleting indexes. Toward...