Advanced SAS Programming

Audience

Existing programmers in the SAS language who wish to gain best practice programming knowledge. Those who wish to process efficiently within the DATA step, in addition to configure their SAS environment to maximise data throughput.

Prerequisites

This course is intended for those who have previously attended SAS Fundamentals, SAS Programming and SAS Macro or equivalent. Additionally we recommend that attendees have six months of regular SAS programming experience to gain the most benefit from this course and have had some exposure to Proc SQL and Enterprise Guide.

IMPORTANT: The Advanced SAS Programming course builds on the core concepts of Base, Macro and SQL programming and assumes the delegate already has a working knowledge of the following.

Using either the SAS Display Manager, SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Studio to:

• Write DATA step code using
  • Data set options such as KEEP, DROP, RENAME and WHERE
  • Use routine DATA step constructs like IF statements, DO loops and arrays
  • Create variables using expressions and functions
  • Read data using the SET or MERGE statements
  • Import data using the INFILE and INPUT statements
• Familiarity with the following SAS procedures:
  • Proc SORT
  • Proc FORMAT
  • Proc TRANSPOSE
  • Proc MEANS / Proc SUMMARY
• Use of BY-group processing (i.e. using a BY statement in DATA and Proc steps)
• Understand when and how to use Informats and Formats
• Understand the Compilation and Execution phases of the DATA step
• Understand how macro variables are created, resolved and stored
• Understand how to create macros with parameters, macro statements and use macro debugging options
• Create and resolve macro variables within the DATA step
• Write basic SQL queries to extract data from one or more tables of data.

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