SQL Passthrough in SAS

sql sas proc-sql
Tommy picture Tommy · Mar 11, 2009 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

Are there any advantages of using SQL Passthrough facility along with SAS?

Answer

AFHood picture AFHood · Mar 11, 2009

Although this question is overly broad, I can provide an overly broad answer.

The pass-through SQL in SAS allows you to communicate directly with a database. This becomes very advantageous when you are using database specific functions. An example would be Oracle's stats functions. You do not have to worry about how SAS will handle your coding or translate your SQL.

Additionally, it has also been a benefit to us that Pass-through SQL requires very little processing on the SAS side. If you have an extremely busy SAS box, you can opt to send the processing logic directly to the database. This is possible without using Pass-through SQL, but you have a higher degree of control when utilizing it.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of benefits, simply a few high level perks to using pass-through SQL. If you have a more concrete use case, we can discuss the specific differences in coding techniques.

Related questions

How to find the length of a numerical variable using PROC SQL

I have a dataset with a column of phone numbers. I want to filter this dataset using PROC SQL WHERE the length of the numbers is at least 7 digits. In normal SQL I can just apply a length function around …

Read More
SAS Proc sql row number

How do I get the row number of an observation in proc sql, similar to _N_ for a datastep in proc sql? For example proc sql outobs=5; select case mod(<something>, 2) when 0 then "EVEN" else "ODD" end from …

Read More
SAS datastep/SQL select latest record from multiple records with same ID

For example I have a dataset as below: id Date 1 2000/01/01 1 2001/01/01 1 2002/01/01 2 2003/01/01 By datastep or sql, how could I get the record with id = 1 and latest Date 2002/01/01? Help is appreciated and thanks in advance.

Read More