SAS Programming Guidelines Interview Questions You'll Most Likel

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Table of Contents
1. Efficient SAS Programming
2. Memory Usage
3. Data Storage Space
4. Best Practices
5. Sorting Strategies
6. Samples
7. Using Indexes
8. Combining Data Vertically
9. Combining Data Horizontally
10. Lookup Tables
11. Formatting Data
12. Tracking Changes
HR Interview Questions
a) 215 SAS Programming Guidelines Interview Questions, Answers and proven Strategies for getting hired as an IT professional
b) Dozens of examples to respond to interview questions
d) 2 Aptitude Tests download available on
COM077000   COMPUTERS / Mathematical & Statistical Software
MAT029000   MATHEMATICS / Probability & Statistics / General
COM021030   COMPUTERS / Databases / Data Mining
Sample from the book
1: How do you achieve scalability in SAS programming?
SAS program scalability can be achieved in 2 ways - by scaling up and scaling out. Scalability is ensuring the lowest time to solution, especially for the most vital tasks. Typically, when you want to speed up the task completion, you either try to complete multiple processes at the same time or distribute the task across various processors and do parallel processing. This, sometimes, involve overlapping of certain processes. Scaling up requires better hardware that is capable of multiprocessing which is known as symmetric multiprocessing or SMP. Scaling out requires more servers that can handle distributed processing.
143: List the advantages and disadvantages of using IF-THEN/ELSE statement to combine the data.
An IF- THEN/ ELSE statement is helpful to combine the data.
The advantages of using IF-THEN/ELSE statement are as follows:
a) It is easy to use and easy to understand
b) DATA step can be used along with IF-THEN/ELSE statement and hence it is more versatile
c) It can be used for combining the data even if the look up values are not stored in the data set. If the look up values are stored in the data set, the IF-THEN/ ELSE statement can be used to handle any relations between the data
d) It can be used to retrieve a single value as well as multiple values
The disadvantages of using IF-THEN/ELSE statement are as follows:
a) It makes the program longer
b) It requires maintenance; in situations where there are a large number of look up values, the look up values changefrequently, or the look up values are used in multiple programs, then the resources required for maintaining this technique are large making it unsuitable for use
165: What is the function of FMTSEARCH= system option?
FMTSEARCH= system option is used to tell SAS the location of formats. It specifies the name of the catalog where the format needs to be searched.
Example: Suppose the formats specified in the exam and result library need to be used for a particular program. The following specifies that SAS needs to search the format in the exam and result library.
options fmtsearchexam result);
183: In what situations are integrity constraints enforced?
Once INTEGRITY constraints are created, SAS enforces the constraints when ever data is modified in place. That is the integrity constraints are enforced when ever data is updated using
a) Data editing windows
b) Data step with modify statement
d) PROC SQL with INSERT INTO, UPDATE, SET statements
199: How are particular generations of a Data Set selected from a generation group?
The GENNUM= data set option is used to select a particular generation of a data set from a generation group.
Example: The following program illustrates the use of GENNUM= data set option. This is an absolute reference to a generation data set.
proc print data = exam.set1(gennum = 4);
215: How does the number of pages in a file affect the decision to use an INDEX?
SAS decides about the use of an index after considering many factors including the number of pages in a file and order of data.
SAS decides not to use an index if the total number of pages in the data file is less than 3. In this scenario sequential access is faster and more efficient in terms of resource use.
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