Chapter 4: Managing ETL in SAS

This chapter covers issues and topics that need to be considered and addressed in the management of extract, transform, and load (ETL) functions in a SAS data warehouse. First, we discuss the different storage environments needed within the SAS data warehouse, and how staff user groups must be designated to correspond to these different storage environments so that access to them is internally controlled. Second, managing the storage of documentation for source datasets and recommendations for dataset naming conventions are covered.

Next, we describe SAS arrays, and a demonstration explaining how they are used in data steps (when performing transformation) is provided. The use of arrays can impact variable naming conventions in SAS, which are discussed with regard to using arrays in transformation code, as well as with respect to maintaining data in an evolving warehouse environment. Modular code is described and a set of code-naming conventions is...