Chapter 2: Reading Big Data into SAS

This chapter will introduce SAS data warehouse developers to the issues and strategies surrounding reading big data into SAS. SAS has native data formats *.SAS7bdat and XPT, but also reads in non-native formats such as *.csv and *.txt. There are advantages and disadvantages to storing data in any of these formats, and special considerations need to be made when preparing transfers of big data in these formats. SAS warehouse developers are tasked with reading data from multiple different source systems into SAS, and this can be done using infile statements, PROC IMPORT, or a strategy that combines both techniques. Because SAS has proficiency in handling big data, SAS data warehouses often need to read in large extracts from legacy systems, many of which provide fixed-width extracts. These can be particularly challenging to read into SAS, and so this chapter also describes approaches to tackling these challenges.

This chapter takes a deep dive...