SAS ONLINE TRAINING:

        SAS is a leader in business analytics. Through innovative analytics it caters to business intelligence and data management software and services. SAS transforms data into insight which can give a fresh perspective on business.

UNDERSTANDING TERMS IN A SAS DATA STRUCTURE

     DATA VALUE: The basic unit of information are:

1.     main types of variable types: numeric and character 

2.     OBSERVATION: All the data values associated with a particular record. 

3.     DATA SET: It is a collection of observation

RULES FOR SAS NAMES

1.SAS variable/variable names must be between 1 and 32 characters long. 

2.The first character must be a letter or an underscore. 

3.Characters after the first may be letters, digits or underscores. 

RULES FOR SAS STATEMENTS

1.     SAS statements may begin in any column of the line. 

2.     SAS statements end with a semicolon (;). 

3.     Some SAS statements consist of more than one line of commands.  

4.     A SAS statement may continue over more than one line. 

There are two major building blocks in SAS:

      1.DATA step 

     2.SAS built in procedures

DATA STEP:

In a Data step the following can be performed.

1.     defining the variables 

2.     read input files

3.     assign values to the variables, 

4.     creating new variables,

5.     merging two data sets 

6.     formatting and labeling variables

 SOME IMPORTANT SAS FUNCTIONS

            This section is for advance reading. For user’s benefit some important SAS functions are mentioned below which can be used in a data step.

         1. DATE (): produces the current date as SAS date, value representing the number of days between January 1, 1960 and the current date.

              

        2. DAY (DATE): It returns an Integer representing the day of the month from SAS DATE value. E.g. Day1=DAY(Today_Date); The value of Day1 will be

         3. MONTH (DATE): It returns the numeric value representing the month from SAS DATE value. E.g. Month1=MONTH(Today_Date); The value of Month1 will be 8.

         4. YEAR (DATE): It returns the 4 digits numeric value representing the year from SAS DATE value. E.g. Year1=YEAR(Today_Date); The value of Year1 will be 2010.

         5. LENGTH(argument): Calculate length of a variable or a constant. Default length of numeric variable is 8. E.g. String2='Rocky Hill'; Len1=LENGTH(String2); The value of Len1 will be 10 which is the length of the string ‘Rocky Hill’.