Chapter 1: Using SAS in a Data Mart, Data Lake, or Data Warehouse

The purpose of this chapter is to showcase how SAS has been used in data warehousing over its lifetime, and how that history impacts SAS data warehousing today. It provides an opportunity to see how slight changes in coding in SAS data steps can greatly impact data input/output (I/O). It also covers how SAS data is managed, and how Base SAS, the analytic component, interacts with stored data.

As SAS developed, there became a need to set indexes on variables, and to use SQL coding in SAS. How PROC SQL in SAS compares with data steps and other SQL programming will be reviewed in this chapter. I will also explain strategies to deal with memory issues in SAS, and how it has evolved to now be used with data in the cloud.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• How early versions of SAS handled data

• Different ways to access data in SAS

• Considerations in improving I/O in SAS

• Dealing with storage and memory issues in SAS

• Using SAS in modern data warehousing

  Note:

  The links to all the white papers and other sources mentioned in the chapter are provided in the Further reading section toward the end of the chapter.