Leonid Batkhan

4月 012018

BREAKING NEWS. Today, shortly after midnight on the U.S. East Coast, Cary, NC-based SAS Institute successfully completed its first space exploration mission.

This interplanetary expedition was conducted on a SAS-designed manned spacecraft powered by our state-of-the-art atomic Collider Acceleration System (CAS) engine. A crew of three SAS volunteers took part in that undertaking. These brave souls were:

spacecraft commanderspacecraft pilot/engineerspacecraft mission specialist

All three specialize in terrestrial communications (i.e. social media) and received special training on extra-terrestrial travel and communications. Their mission was to study the Venus space area up close to find out what causes the gravitational field anomaly that has recently been observed there.

How it all started

Those of us who attended last year’s SAS Global Forum in Orlando must remember the inspiring speech by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. The main idea I took away from his speech was that success is not a good teacher, as it teaches us nothing; failure, on the hand, is a very good teacher, at least for those of us who are willing to learn the lesson.  But, as we all know, there is a time to fail/learn, and there is a time to succeed.

I can’t speak for all of you, but, man, were we inspired by that speech! We at SAS knew right then that we, too, wanted to explore the “final frontier.” As a data analytics software company, all our studies start with data explorations. Our public relations group worked tirelessly with the major stakeholder Government agencies and private companies (NASA, SpaceX, ROSCOSMOS, etc.) to get ahold of the data. When our analysts finally did get access to the data, they were overwhelmed by its size. That was really BIG data (literally of cosmic proportions) – data about every little pocket of spacetime in our Solar system, collected over multiple years of astronomical observations and Space exploration programs.

Predictive Modeling

Using our flagship SAS Viya Analytics software, we mined these vast data archives, employing various predictive modeling, computational, and heuristic techniques such as automatic machine deep space learning, 3D artificial intelligence simulation, and, most importantly, natural, coffee-stimulated human intelligence.

What caught our attention was the space area around Venus. Planet Venus is notorious for being an outlier. First of all, it spins slower than any other planet in the Solar system, even slower than it revolves around the Sun. In fact it spins about 243 times slower than Earth. That means that a day there lasts approximately 243 Earth-days, making it longer than a Venusian year, which is only about 225 Earth-days long.

Second of all, it spins backwards, in the opposite direction from most other planets, including Earth, so that on Venus the sun rises in the west.

Third, it has the highest mean surface temperature of all the Solar System planets – reaching up to 726 °K (452 °C or 870 °F), which is 1.6 times hotter than Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. This is because of Venus’ thick atmosphere composed mostly of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide), which trap a good portion of the Sun’s heat.

However, the most unusual thing that we discovered was an aberration in Venus’ gravitational field, suggesting a significant mass (possibly large enough to be a planet) hidden behind it.

The following bubble plot uses a logarithmic scale for x-axis (distance from the Sun) and visualizes our finding:

SAS VA bubble plot showing planets period of revolution around the Sun

Now we can see it clearly. Not only does it show an unknown small planet behind Venus, it also explains why it is not visible from Earth: its period of revolution around the Sun is exactly the same as that of Venus, which is why it has always been obstructed by Venus, and not visible from Earth.

Due to its very close proximity to Venus, there is a good chance that even a slight tangential nudge experienced by planet “2-?” might break gravitational equilibrium, causing it to start orbiting Venus as a moon rather than the Sun.  We will be observing this situation carefully.

Another interesting finding is that this unknown planet is a much more hospitable place than Venus, as it has an oxygen-dominated atmosphere and a relaxing surface temperature only slightly higher than that of Earth, as it is shown in the following chart:

SAS VA bubble plot - Mean surface temperature of the Solar System planets

At this point we had had enough modeling and needed some hard proof.

Space exploration mission

We leveraged our best human intelligence resources around the world to progress rapidly through all the required phases of spacecraft design and construction, crew selection and training, and finally launching and completing the space mission.

All in all, it took just under a year (11 months to be precise) to bring this project to completion. The data collection and exploration phase took around one month, which is in line with the capacity of the SAS Viya analytical environment. The design and build phase took about five months, and it was conducted in parallel with crew selection and training; finally, the fly phase also took 5 months including launch, travel to the Venus space area with a flyby of Venus and the planet X, and a return to Earth. As you can see from the picture at the very top, the unknown planet X hidden behind Venus does indeed exist. However, further analysis and study will be necessary to determine the nature of the observed surface irregularities.

Your participation and input are requested

If you would like you to engage in the fascinating field of space exploration, you are welcome to use the following SAS-generated summary data table:

Data about planets of the Solar System

If you are a detail-oriented type, it will be obvious to you that the circumference of the new planet oddly equals 200π2 (km), which defies all the canons of geometry. You are welcome to prove or disprove the possibility of such an unusual occurrence.

So far, we have referred to this new planet as “2-?” and “planet X”, but it’s about time to give it a name, a real name as all other 8 planets of our Solar System have.

Our first inclination was to name it after our newest SAS analytical software environment, Viya. But do we really want to dilute the brand by applying it to two different though prominent objects?!

That is why we decided to reach out to you, our readers, to solicit ideas for the name of the new planet.  Please provide a brief justification for your name suggestion. We also welcome any insights, hypotheses and data stories you might come up with based on the collected data. We greatly appreciate your input.


Please click here for full disclosure.

SAS discovers a new planet in the Solar System was published on SAS Users.

1月 262018

Batch Scripts in SASIf Necessity is the mother of Invention, then, perhaps, the father of Automation is Laziness. Automation is all about convenience, comfort, and productivity. Why do it yourself if you can devise something to do it for you!

In my previous post Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux, we learned that in order to automate SAS jobs submissions, they are often run in batch mode. We also learned that we usually create batch scripts as a convenient way to run SAS programs in batch. To create a unique SAS log file generated with each batch submission, a typical batch script may look like follows:

/sas/SASHome/SASFoundation/9.4/sas $pgmname -log $logname

It will allow you to submit your SAS program /sas/code/project1/program1.sas in batch, and also capture SAS log file with a convenient date-time suffix in the same directory.

SAS program to write batch scripts

But what if we are deploying multiple SAS programs? Well, then we would need to create a batch script for each of them. They will all look similar to each other, and that is when most human errors usually occur – when we do something similar, monotonously, over and over again.  Besides, I found working with the Unix Visual Editor (“vi editor”) is not quite a 21st century experience.

What would a normal SAS programmer do in such a situation? That’s right – we would write a SAS program to write a batch script file! Let’s do it. Let’s automate the automation.

In its simplest form, to replicate the above batch script example our SAS program would look like this:

filename b '/sas/code/project1/program1.sh';
data _null_;
file b;
put _infile_;

Setting up batch file permissions

As we already know from my previous post, we need to assign certain permissions to our batch file in order to make it executable. For example, if you want to give yourself (Owner) and Group execution permissions then your script file permissions can be as:

-rwxr-x---, or 750 in octal representation.

In order to do that you can to add to your SAS code the following x-statement:

options noxwait;
x 'chmod 750 /sas/code/project1/program1.sh';

Alternatively, you can use %SYSEXEC macro statement (no quoting for the OS command) or SYSTASK statement, or CALL SYSTEM routine (used within a data step).

When you create a batch script by running the above code in SAS Enterprise Guide (EG), you don’t have to leave the comfort of your SAS environment or even touch Unix vi editor. Moreover, you can even submit your SAS job in batch mode right from your SAS EG Program Editor.

However, all of these will work fine, unless XCMD System Option is disabled (NOXCMD).

Assigning batch file permissions when XCMD System Option is disabled

ERROR: Shell escape is not valid in this SAS session.

Bummer! Have you ever seen this error message in SAS Enterprise Guide while trying to run SAS code with the X statement? It indicates that executing OS commands in the SAS environment is not allowed.

In many organizations, IT department policies do not allow enabling the SAS XCMD system option due to cyber-security concerns. This is usually done system-wide for the whole SAS Enterprise client-server installation via SAS configuration.  In this case, no operating system command is allowed to be executed from within SAS.

Of course, this substantially limits SAS’ automation power, but that is the goal and the price to pay for enhanced security.

Still, even without OS command execution at our disposal, we can set Unix script file permissions using FILENAME statement’s PERMISSION= option. Then our above filename statement will look like this:


However, it is important to realize that your ability to fully control file permissions via FILENAME statement’s PERMISSION= option is still restricted by the Unix umask value set by your IT system administrator. But usually, it is not overly restrictive, at least for the purpose of creating executable files in the environments I have worked with.

The double benefit of the FILENAME statement’s PERMISSION= option is that it can be used for setting up file permissions in any SAS installation whether the XCMD system option is enabled or disabled.

SAS macro to create batch script files

Let’s wrap all the above SAS code pieces into a SAS macro that writes batch scripts. Here is the macro code definition:

%macro write_shell(code);
   %let fdir = %substr(&code,1,%sysfunc(findc(&code,/,b)));
   options dlcreatedir;
   libname _flib "&fdir";
   libname _flib;
   %let core = %substr(&code,1,%eval(%length(&code)-4));
   filename _fout "&core..sh" permission='A::u::rwx,A::g::r-x,A::o::---'; 
   data _null_;
      file _fout;
         '#!/bin/sh' //
         'now=$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H.%M.%S)' /
         "pgmname=""&code""" /
         "logname=""&core._$now.log""" /
         'sas $pgmname -log $logname'
   filename _fout;
%mend write_shell;

The single macro parameter (code) represents full path name of your SAS code. And here is a macro invocation example:


The assumption here is that the script file gets created in the same directory as the relevant SAS code and SAS logs for each of the batch runs. It will be assigned the same name as your SAS program, only with the .sh name extension. As you can see, we do some string parsing to derive directory name, script file name and SAS log file name from the single macro parameter representing full path name of your SAS code. As an added bonus, if a specified directory (/sas/code/project1/) does not yet exist, it will be created by this macro. DLCREATEDIR System Option (along with the two subsequent libname statements) are responsible for the directory creation.

If you want to create many script files for your multiple SAS programs, you just invoke the macro as many times. You can even go totally data-driven for mass script file creation.

Do you find this useful?

Please let me know in the comments section below if you find this blog post useful. Thank you for reading! I also invite you to share your ideas and experiences on the topic.

Let SAS write batch scripts for you was published on SAS Users.

12月 202017

Running SAS programs in batchWhile SAS program development is usually done in an interactive SAS environment (SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Display Manager, SAS Studio, etc.), when it comes to running SAS programs in a production or operations environment, it is routinely done in batch mode.

Why run SAS programs in batch mode?

First and foremost, this is done for automation, as the batch process does not require human participation at the time of run. It can be scheduled to run (using Operating System scheduler or other scheduling software) while we sleep, at any time of the day or at any time interval between two consecutive runs.

Running SAS programs in batch mode allows streamlining SAS processing by eliminating the possibility of human error, submitting multiple SAS jobs (programs) all at once or in a sequence securing programs and/or data dependencies.

SAS batch processing also takes care of self-documenting, as it automatically generates and stores SAS logs and outputs.

Imagine the following scenario. Every night, a SAS batch process “wakes up” at 3 a.m. and runs an ETL process on a SAS Application server that extracts multiple tables from a database, transforms, combines, and loads them into a SAS datamart; then moves some data tables across the network and loads them into SAS LASR server, so when you are back to work in the morning your SAS Visual Analytics application has all its data refreshed and ready to roll. Of course, the process schedule can be custom-tailored to your particular needs; your batch jobs may run every 15 minutes, once a week, every first Friday of the month – you name it.

What is a batch script file?

To submit a single SAS program in batch mode manually, you could submit an OS command that looks something like the following:


sas /sas/code/proj1/job1.sas -log /sas/code/proj1/job1.log


"C:\Program Files\SASHome\SASFoundation\9.4\Sas.exe" -SYSIN c:\proj1\job1.sas -NOSPLASH -ICON -LOG c:\proj1\job1.log

However, submitting an OS command manually has too many drawbacks: it’s too much typing, it only submits one SAS program at a time, and most importantly – it is manual, which means it is prone to human error.

Usually, these OS commands are packaged into so called batch files (shell scripts in Unix) that allow for sequential, parallel, as well as conditional execution of multiple OS line commands. They can be run either manually, or automatically – on schedule, or called by other batch scripts.

In a Windows/DOS Operating System, these script files are called batch files and have .bat filename extensions. In Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, these script files are called shell scripts and have .sh filename extensions.

Since Windows batch files are similar, but slightly different from the Unix (and its open source cousin Linux) shell scripts, in the below examples we are going to use Unix/Linux shell scripts only, in order to avoid any confusion. And we are going to use terms Unix and Linux interchangeably.

Here is the typical content of a Linux shell script file to run a single SAS program:


Note, that the shell script syntax allows for some basic programming features like current datetime function, formatting, and variables. It also provides some conditional processing similar to “if-then-else” logic. For detailed information on the shell scripting language you may refer to the following BASH shell script tutorial or any other source of many dialects or flavors of the shell scripting (C Shell, Korn Shell, etc.)

Let’s save the above shell script as the following file:

How to submit a SAS program via Unix script

In order to run this shell script we would submit the following Linux command:

Or, if we navigate to the directory first:
cd /sas/code/project1

then we can submit an abbreviated Linux command
When run, this shell script not only executes a SAS program (program1.sas), but for every run it also creates and saves a uniquely named SAS Log file. You may create the SAS log file in the same directory where the SAS code is stored, as specified in the script shell above, or specify another directory of your choice.

For example, it creates the following SAS log file:

The file name uniqueness is achieved by adding a date/time stamp suffix between the SAS program name and .log file name extension, in this particular case indicating that this SAS log file was created on December 6, 2017, at 09:15:20 (hours:minutes:seconds).

Unix script for submitting multiple SAS programs

Unix scripts may contain not only OS commands, but also other Unix script calls. You can mix-and-match OS commands and other script calls.

When scripts are created for each individual SAS program that you intend to run in a batch, you can easily combine them into a program flow by creating a flow script containing those single program scripts. For example, let’s create a script file /sas/code/project1/flow1.sh with the following contents:


When submitted as


it will sequentially execute three scripts - program1.sh, program2.sh, and program3.sh, each of which will execute the corresponding SAS program - program1.sas, program2.sas, and program3.sas, and produce three SAS logs - program1.log, program2.log, and program3.log.

Unix script file permissions

In order to be executable, UNIX script files must have certain permissions. If you create the script file and want to execute it yourself only, the file permissions can be as follows:

-rwxr-----, or 740 in octal representation.

This means that you (the Owner of the script file) have Read (r), Write (w) and Execute (x) permission as indicated by the green highlighting; Group owning the script file has only Read (r) permission as indicated by yellow highlighting;  Others have no permissions to the script file at all as indicated by red highlighting.



In this case, your group has Read (r) and Execute (x) permissions as highlighted in yellow.

In Unix, file permissions are assigned using the chmod Unix command.

Note, that in both examples above we do not give Others any permissions at all. Remember that file permissions are a security feature, and you should assign them at the minimum level necessary.

Conditional execution of scripts and SAS programs

Here is an example of a Unix script file that allows running multiple SAS programs and OS commands at different times.


#1 extract data from a database

&gt;#2 copy data to the Visual Analytics autoload directory
scp -B userid@sasAPPservername:/sas/data/*.sas7bdat userid@sasVAservername:/sas/config/.../AutoLoad

#3 run weekly, every Monday
dow=$(date +%w)
if [ $dow -eq 1 ]

#4 run monthly, first Friday of every month
dom=$(date +%d)
if [ $dow -eq 5 -a $dom -le 7 ]

In this script, the following logical operators are used: -eq (equal), -le (less or equal), -a (logical and).

As you can see, the script logic takes care of branching to execute different SAS programs when certain timing conditions are met. With such an approach, you would need to schedule only this single script to run at a specified time/interval, say daily at 3 a.m.

In this case, the script will “wake up” every morning at 3 a.m. and execute its component scripts either unconditionally, or conditionally.

If one of the included programs needs to run at a different, lesser frequency (e.g. every Monday, or monthly on first Friday of every month) the script logic will trigger those executions at the appropriate times.

In the above script example steps #1 and #2 will execute every time (unconditionally) the script runs (daily). Step #1 runs ETL program to extract data from a database, step #2 copies the extracted data across the network from SAS Application server to the SAS LASR Analytic server’s drop zone from where they are automatically loaded (autoloaded) into the LASR.

Step #3 will run conditionally every Monday ( $dow -eq 1). Step #4 will run conditionally every first Friday of a month ($dow -eq 5 -a $dom -le 7).

For more information on how to format date for use in shell scripts please refer to this post.

Do you run your SAS programs in batch?

Please share your batch experiences in the comment section below. I am sure the rest of us will really appreciate it!

Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux was published on SAS Users.

11月 022017

The purpose of this blog post is to demonstrate a SAS coding technique that allows for calculations with multiple variables across a SAS dataset, whether or not their values belong to the same or different observations.

calculations across observations of a SAS data table

What do we want?

As illustrated in the picture on the right, we want to be able to hop, or jump, back and forth, up and down across observations of a data table in order to implement calculations not just on different variables, but with their values from different observations of a data table.

In essence, we want to access SAS dataset variable values similar to accessing elements of a matrix (aij), where rows represent dataset observations, and columns represent dataset variables.

Combine and Conquer

In the spirit of my earlier post Combine and Conquer with SAS, this technique combines the functionality of the LAG function, which allows us to retrieve the variable value of a previous observation from a queue, with an imaginary, non-existent in SAS, LEAD function that reads a subsequent observation in a data set while processing the current observation during the same iteration of the DATA step.

LAG function

LAG<n> function in SAS is not your usual, ordinary function. While it provides a mechanism of retrieving previous observations in a data table, it does not work “on demand” to arbitrarily read a variable value from a previous observation n steps back. If you want to use it conditionally in some observations of a data step, you still need to call it in every iteration of that data step. That is because it retrieves values from a queue that is built sequentially for each invocation of the LAG<n> function. In essence, in order to use the LAG function even just once in a data step, you need to call it every time in each data step iteration until that single use.

Moreover, if you need to use each of the LAG1, LAG2, . . . LAGn functions just once, in order to build these queues, you have to call each of them in every data step iteration even if you are going to use them in some subsequent iterations.

LEAD function

The LEAD function is implemented in Oracle SQL and it returns data from the next or subsequent row of a data table. It allows you to query more than one row in a table at a time without having to join the table to itself.

There is no such function in SAS. However, the POINT= option of the SET statement in a SAS data step allows retrieving any observation by its number from a data set using random (direct) access to read a SAS data set. This will allow us to simulate a LEAD function in SAS.

HOP function

But why do we need two separate functions like LAG and LEAD in order to retrieve non-current observations. In essence, these two functions do the same thing, just in opposite directions. Why can’t we get by with just one function that does both backwards and forwards “hopping?”

Let’s combine and conquer.

Ideally, we would like to construct a new single function - let’s call it HOP(x, j) - that combines the best qualities of both LAG and LEAD functions. The two arguments of the HOP function would be as follows:

x – SAS variable name (numeric or character) the value of we are retrieving;

j – hop distance (numeric) – an offset from the current observation; negative values being lagging (hopping back), positive values being leading (hopping forward), and a zero-value meaning staying within the current observation.

The sign of the second argument defines whether we lag (minus) or lead (plus). The absolute value of this second argument defines how far from the current observation we hop.

Alternatively, we could have the first argument as a column number, and the second argument as a row/observation number, if we wanted this function to deal with the data table more like with a matrix. But relatively speaking, the method doesn’t really matter as long as we can unambiguously identify a data element or a cell. To stay within the data step paradigm, we will stick with the variable name and offset from the current observation (_n_) as arguments.

Let’s say we have a data table SAMPLE, where for each event FAIL_FLAG=1 we want to calculate DELTA as the difference between DATE_OUT, one observation after the event, and DATE_IN, two observations before the event:

Calculations across observations of a SAS data table

That is, we want to calculate DELTA in the observation where FAIL_FLAG = 1 as

26MAR2017 18JAN2017 = 67 (as shown in light-blue highlighting in the above figure).

With the HOP() function, that calculation in the data step would look like this:

data SAMPLE;
   set SAMPLE;
   if FAIL_FLAG then DELTA = hop(DATE_OUT,1) - hop(DATE_IN,-2);

It would be reasonable to suggest that the hop() function should return a missing value when the second argument produces an observation number outside of the dataset boundary, that is when

_n_ + j < 0 or _n_ + j > num, where _n_ is the current observation number of the data step iteration; num is the number of observations in the dataset; j is the offset argument value.

Do you see anything wrong with this solution? I don’t. Except that the HOP function exists only in my imagination. Hopefully, it will be implemented soon if enough SAS users ask for it. But until then, we can use its surrogate in the form of a %HOP macro.

%HOP macro

The HOP macro grabs the value of a specified variable in an offset observation relative to the current observation and assigns it to another variable. It is used within a SAS data step, but it cannot be used in an expression; each invocation of the HOP macro can only grab one value of a variable across observations and assign it to another variable within the current observation.

If you need to build an expression to do calculations with several variables from various observations, you would need to first retrieve all those values by invoking the %hop macro as many times as the number of the values involved in the expression.

Here is the syntax of the %HOP macro, which has four required parameters:


d – input data table name;

x – source variable name;

y – target variable name;

j – integer offset relative to the current observation. As before, a negative value means a previous observation, a positive value means a subsequent observation, and zero means the current observation.

Using this %HOP macro we can rewrite our code for calculating DELTA as follows:

 data SAMPLE (drop=TEMP1 TEMP2);
   set SAMPLE;
   if FAIL_FLAG then
      %hop(SAMPLE,DATE_OUT,TEMP1, 1)
      %hop(SAMPLE,DATE_IN, TEMP2,-2)
      DELTA = TEMP1 - TEMP2;

Note that we should not have temporary variables TEMP1 and TEMP2 listed in a RETAIN statement, as this could mess up our calculations if the j-offset throws an observation number out of the dataset boundary.

Also, the input data table name (d parameter value) is the one that is specified in the SET statement, which may or may not be the same as the name specified in the DATA statement.

In case you are wondering where you can download the %HOP macro from, here it is in its entirety:

%macro hop(d,x,y,j);
   _p_ = _n_ + &j;
   if (1 le _p_ le _o_) then set &d(keep=&x rename=(&x=&y)) point=_p_ nobs=_o_;
%mend hop;

Of course, it is “free of charge” and “as is” for your unlimited use.

Your turn

Please provide your feedback and share possible use cases for the HOP function/macro in the Comment section below. This is your chance for your voice to be heard!

Hopping for the best - calculations across SAS dataset observations was published on SAS Users.

10月 202017


“The difference between style and fashion is quality.”

-Giorgio Armani


Changing your SAS EG report style on the fly

Let’s say we run the following SAS program in EG:

SAS code sample to run in SAS EG
Results tab in SAS EG

Properties for SAS Report

SAS report in new style



Browsing SAS EG styles



Style Manager window


Changing your default SAS EG report style



Options window to choose default report format


Select new report style



Server-side style templates




proc template;
   path sashelp.tmplmst;
   list styles;


Report listing


proc template;
   list styles;

Server-side templates are applied to ALL Results Formats.

CSS styles






Server-side styles vs. CSS styles










Adding your custom SAS EG report style


Open Style Manager with either one of the following ways:

Tools → Style Manager

Tools → Options… → Results/SAS Reports → Manage Styles

Tools → Options… → Results/HTML → Manage Styles



  1. Style representing style name;
  3. URL showing the location of the CSS file.



Style Editor window




Adding an external style to Enterprise Guide


Adding an external style



Checking This is a SAS server style only checkbox



In this post I tried to present a comprehensive guide on using styles in SAS Enterprise Guide. Please use the Comments section below to share your experience with Enterprise Guide as it relates to reports styling.


Little SAS Enterprise Guide bookThe Little SAS Enterpriser Guide Book


I Didn’t  Know SAS®  Enterprise Guide®  Could Do  That!

Creating reports in style with SAS Enterprise Guide was published on SAS Users.

9月 152017

Whether you are a SAS code creator, a blogger, a technical writer, an editor-in-chief, an executive, a secretary, a developer or programmer in any programming language or simply someone who uses computer or hand-held device for writing, you need to read this blog post – your life is about to change forever!

Did you know that you can use a web browser as a SAS code editor? I’m not talking about browser-based SAS programming interfaces like SAS University Edition or SAS Studio; these are full-blown applications. I’m talking about converting a regular web browser into a “notepad” where you can type, display, and save your SAS code. Or non-SAS code. Or practically anything. And you don’t even have to be connected to the Internet to use this browser functionality.

Converting a web browser into a notepad

This trick works with most modern browsers:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Safari

It will not work on Internet Explorer 11.

Try this: open your web browser (I am using Firefox in the examples below) or a new tab in your browser and type the following in the URL field (case insensitive):

data:text/html,<html contentEditable>

Hit Enter. Then click anywhere in the browser body.

Your browser has just turned into a Notepad. You can now type anything in it, including SAS code:

Using web browser as SAS code editor

In order to save your SAS code in Firefox, click on File ⇒ Save Page As… and save it as type Text Files (*.txt;*.text):

Saving SAS code in a browser as text file

This functionality is possible thanks to HTML5’s contentEditable attribute and the browsers’ ability to handle data URL.

I don’t know about you, but I find this browser-notepad feature very cool and handy. Not only does it allow you to type SAS code in your browser, but it also gives you the capability to take notes and copy & paste excerpts or code snippets from other web pages on non-web applications. If you use WebEx or Skype or Lync to present one of the SAS web browser-based products such as SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, etc., you can share your browser to your audience and make one of the tabs a typeable area. Then during your presentation you may switch between browser tabs depending on whether you are presenting SAS VA/VS or your own on-the-fly typing.

Bookmark notepad in a browser

If you like this Notepad browser feature, you can easily bookmark it by placing it on the Bookmarks toolbar. In this case, I suggest typing the following line in the URL filed:

data:text/html,<html contentEditable><title>Notepad</title>

and then dragging the image in front of this URL string and dropping it to the Bookmarks toolbar to create a button. Then, every time you need a Notepad it is at your fingertips; you just need to click the button:

Bookmark SAS code editor in a browser

Styling your new SAS editor in a browser

By default, your browser editor does not look pretty. However, you can apply CSS styles to it to make it look better. You can control font (style, size, color), margins, paddings, background and other CSS style attributes. For example, try the following URL:

data:text/html, <textarea style="width:100%; height:100%; padding:20px; font-size:2em; font-family: SAS Monospace; color:darkblue; border:none; border-left: 10px solid lightblue; margin-left: 30px;" autofocus/>

Your web browser editor becomes much more presentable:

Customize SAS code editor in a browser

The autofocus attribute places cursor immediately in the typing area of the browser notepad, without having to click on the browser body first.

I want to hear from you!

Do you like this editable browser feature? Would you use it to enhance your presentations? Do you envision yourself writing SAS code in a browser? An article, a blog post? What other usages can you envision using such a web browser transformation? Do you have any ideas to expand this notepad browser functionality beyond presenting, typing, taking notes, copying/pasting, and saving your SAS code? Can you apply SAS color syntax highlighting in a browser? Or a background image? How about submitting your SAS code from a browser?

Using a web browser as a SAS code editor was published on SAS Users.

8月 022017

In my prior posts (Data-driven SAS macro loops, Modifying variable attributes in all datasets of a SAS library, Automating the loading of multiple database tables into SAS tables), I presented various data-driven applications using SAS macro loops.

However, macro loops are not the only tools available in SAS for developing data-driven programs.

CALL EXECUTE is one of them. The CALL EXECUTE routine accepts a single argument that is a character string or character expression. The character expression is usually a concatenation of strings containing SAS code elements to be executed after they have been resolved. Components of the argument expression can be character constants, data step variables, macro variable reference, as well as macro references. CALL EXECUTE dynamically builds SAS code during DATA step iterations; that code executes after the DATA step’s completion outside its boundary. This makes a DATA step iterating through a driver table an effective SAS code generator similar to that of SAS macro loops.

However, the rather peculiar rules of the CALL EXECUTE argument resolution may make its usage somewhat confusing. Let’s straighten things out.

Argument string has no macro or macro variable reference

If an argument string to the CALL EXECUTE contains SAS code without any macro or macro variable references, that code is simply pushed out (of the current DATA step) and appended to a queue after the current DATA step. As the DATA step iterates, the code is appended to the queue as many times as there are iterations of the DATA step. After the DATA step completes, the code in the queue gets executed in the order of its creation (First In First Out).

The beauty of this process is that the argument string can be a concatenation of character constants (in single or double quotes) and SAS variables which get substituted with their values by CALL EXECUTE for each DATA step iteration. This will produce data-driven, dynamically generated SAS code just like an iterative SAS macro loop.

Let’s consider the following example. Say we need to load multiple Oracle tables into SAS tables.

Step 1. Creating a driver table

In order to make our process data-driven, let’s first create a driver table containing a list of the table names that needed to be extracted and loaded:

/* create a list of tables to extract & load */
libname parmdl '/sas/data/parmdata';
data parmdl.tablelist;
        length tname $8;
        input tname;

This program runs just once to create the driver table parmdl.tablelist.

Step 2. Loading multiple tables

Then, you can use the following data-driven program that runs each time you need to reload Oracle tables into SAS:

/* source ORACLE library */
libname oralib oracle path="xxx" schema="yyy" user="uuu"
 	PASSWORD="{SAS002}ABCDEFG12345678RTUR" access=readonly;
/* target SAS library */
libname sasdl '/sas/data/appdata';
/* driver table SAS library */
libname parmdl '/sas/data/parmdata';
data _null_;
   set parmdl.tablelist;
   call execute(cats(
      'data sasdl.',tname,';',
         'set oralib.',tname,';',

In order to concatenate the components of the CALL EXECUTE argument I used the cats() SAS function which returns a concatenated character string removing leading and trailing blanks.

When this program runs, the SAS log indicates that after the data _null_ step the following statements are added and executed:

NOTE: CALL EXECUTE generated line.
1   + data sasdl.ADDRESS;set oralib.ADDRESS;run;
2   + data sasdl.ACCOUNT;set oralib.ACCOUNT;run;
3   + data sasdl.BENEFIT;set oralib.BENEFIT;run;
4   + data sasdl.FINANCE;set oralib.FINANCE;run;
5   + data sasdl.HOUSING;set oralib.HOUSING;run;

In this example we use data _null_ step to loop through the list of tables (parmdl.tablelist) and for each value of the tname column a new data step gets generated and executed after the data _null_ step. The following diagram illustrates the process:

Diagram explaining CALL EXECUTE for SAS data-driven programming

Argument string has macro variable reference in double quotes

If an argument to the CALL EXECUTE has macro variable references in double quotes, they will be resolved by the SAS macro pre-processor during the DATA step compilation. Nothing unusual. For example, the following code will execute exactly as the above, and macro variable references &olib and &slib will be resolved to oralib and sasdl before CALL EXECUTE takes any actions:

%let olib = oralib;
%let slib = sasdl;
data _null_;
   set parmdl.tablelist;
   call execute (
      "data &slib.."!!strip(tname)!!';'
         "set &olib.."!!strip(tname)!!';'!!

Argument string has macro or macro variable reference in single quotes

Here comes the interesting part. If the argument to CALL EXECUTE has macro or macro variable references in single quotes, they still will be resolved before the code is pushed out of the DATA step, but not by the SAS macro pre-processor during the DATA step compilation as it was in the case of double quotation marks. Macro or macro variable references in single quotes will be resolved by CALL EXECUTE itself. For example, the following code will execute exactly as the above, but macro variable references &olib and &slib will be resolved by CALL EXECUTE:

%let olib = oralib;
%let slib = sasdl;
data _null_;
   set parmdl.tablelist;
   call execute('data &slib..'!!strip(tname)!!';'!!
                'set &olib..'!!strip(tname)!!';'!!

Timing considerations

CAUTION: If your macro contains some non-macro language constructs for assigning macro variables during run time, such as a CALL SYMPUT or SYMPUTX statement (in a DATA step) or an INTO clause (in PROC SQL), resolving those macro variable references by CALL EXECUTE will happen too soon, before your macro-generated code gets pushed out and executed. This will result in unresolved macro variables. Let’s run the following code that should extract Oracle tables into SAS tables as above, but also re-arrange column positions to be in alphabetical order:

%macro onetable (tblname);
   proc contents data=oralib.&tblname out=one(keep=name) noprint;
   proc sql noprint;
      select name into :varlist separated by ' ' from one;
   %put &=varlist;
   data sasdl.&tblname;
      retain &varlist;
      set oralib.&tblname end=last nobs=n;
      if last then call symput('n',strip(put(n,best.)));
   %put Table &tblname has &n observations.;
%mend onetable;
data _null_;
   set parmdl.tablelist;
   call execute('%onetable('!!strip(tname)!!');');

Predictably, the SAS log will show unresolved macro variable references, such as:

WARNING: Apparent symbolic reference VARLIST not resolved.
WARNING: Apparent symbolic reference N not resolved.
Table ADDRESS has &n observations.

SOLUTION: To avoid the timing issue when a macro reference gets resolved by CALL EXECUTE too soon, before macro variables have been assigned during macro-generated step execution, we can strip CALL EXECUTE of the macro resolution privilege. In order to do that, we can mask & and % characters using the %nrstr macro function, thus making CALL EXECUTE “macro-blind,” so it will push the macro code out without resolving it. In this case, macro resolution will happen after the DATA step where CALL EXECUTE resides. If an argument to CALL EXECUTE has a macro invocation, then including it in the %nrstr macro function is the way to go. The following code will run just fine:

data _null_;
   set parmdl.tablelist;
   call execute('%nrstr(%onetable('!!strip(tname)!!'));');

When this DATA step runs, the SAS log indicates that the following statements are added and executed:

NOTE: CALL EXECUTE generated line.
1   + %onetable(ADDRESS);
2   + %onetable(ACCOUNT);
3   + %onetable(BENEFIT);
4   + %onetable(FINANCE);
5   + %onetable(HOUSING);

CALL EXECUTE argument is a SAS variable

The argument to CALL EXECUTE does not necessarily have to contain or be a character constant. It can be a SAS variable, a character variable to be precise. In this case, the behavior of CALL EXECUTE is the same as when the argument is a string in single quotes. It means that if a macro reference is part of the argument value it needs to be masked using the %nrstr() macro function in order to avoid the timing issue mentioned above.

In this case, the argument to the CALL EXECUTE may look like this:

arg = '%nrstr(%mymacro(parm1=VAL1,parm2=VAL2))';
call execute(arg);

Making CALL EXECUTE totally data-driven

In the examples above we used the tablelist driver table to retrieve values for a single macro parameter for each data step iteration. However, we can use a driver table not only to dynamically assign values to one or more macro parameters, but also to control which macro to execute in each data step iteration. The following diagram illustrates the process of totally data-driven SAS program:

Diagram explaining using CALL EXECUTE for SAS data-driven programming


CALL EXECUTE is a powerful tool for developing dynamic data-driven SAS applications. Hopefully, this blog post demonstrates its benefits and clearly explains how to avoid its pitfalls and use it efficiently to your advantage. I welcome your comments, and would love to hear your experiences with CALL EXECUTE.

CALL EXECUTE made easy for SAS data-driven programming was published on SAS Users.

6月 072017

Combine and conquer with SASThe ancient political maxim “divide and conquer” (Lat. “dīvide et īmpera”) has been used for millennia in politics, sociology, and psychology, mainly to manipulate people. In the last two centuries, however, this principle has also been adopted by computer science. It is widely used in computer programming, primarily in computer algorithms such as binary search, quick sort, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), parallel processing algorithms – to name a few.

A typical Divide and Conquer algorithm consists of the following steps:

  1. Divide – break the given problem into smaller pieces (sub-problems) of the same type;
  2. Conquer – solve these smaller pieces (sub-problems);
  3. Combine – aggregate the results of the solved sub-problems to deduce the result of the initial problem.

However, in this blog post we’ll reverse the “divide and conquer” principle and go backwards from step three to step two, to combine and then conquer.

In our day-to-day programming activities, we may not need to divide a problem in order to solve it. In many cases, we deal with small pieces of a puzzle (language elements) provided by the SAS programming language, and we solve some larger problems by combining those elements.

Let’s consider some examples.

Combining SAS Formats

Suppose you have a variable x in a SAS table on which you need to report with the following requirement. Depending on the variable value, you will need to apply different SAS formats:

Different SAS formats based on variable values

In other words, you need to display percentages that are greater than 10% as whole numbers, percentages between 1% and 10% as numbers with one decimal point, and percentages that are less than 1% as numbers with two decimal points.

You may get away with proc format’s picture statement with a proper multiplier – but good luck with that. Fortunately, there is a much better way of solving this problem. Did you know that you can use already existing formats as labels in proc format’s value statement? In other words, we can combine several SAS formats while defining another SAS format.

The above problem is easily solved by defining a new format as a combination of different PERCENTw.d formats as follows:

proc format;
   value pctmod
      -0.01 <-< 0.01 = [percent10.2] 
      -0.1 - -0.01, 0.01 - 0.1 = [percent10.1]
      low -< -0.1, 0.1 <- high = [percent10.0]

Here is what this format does:

Unformatted and formatted values

You can combine any other existing formats as needed, including mixing and matching SAS-supplied formats and user-defined formats. You can even use existing formats within the PICTURE statement of the PROC FORMAT. For example, the following format will format values between 0 and 1 as cents (e.g. ¢75) while values greater than 1 as dollars (e.g. $9,340):

proc format;
   picture dolcent
	  0 <-< 1 = '99' (prefix='¢' mult=100)
	  1 - high = [dollar32.0]

Here is what this format does:

Formatted values vs. unformatted values

When using an existing format as a label, make sure to enclose the format name in square brackets, e.g. [date9.], and do not enclose the name of the existing format in single or double quotes.

Using an existing format in the format definition can be construed as format nesting. A nested level of one means that you are creating the format A with the format B as a formatted value. However, if you also create format B with the format C as a formatted value, then you have nested level of two. Avoid nesting formats with a level higher than one, as the resource requirements may increase dramatically with each additional level.

Combining SAS Libraries

Suppose you have defined several SAS data libraries, such as

libname apples 'c:\projects\garden\apples';
libname oranges 'c:\projects\garden\oranges';
libname tomatoes 'c:\projects\garden\tomatoes';

You can then logically combine (concatenate) them into a single library:

libname combolib (apples oranges tomatoes);


libname combolib ('c:\projects\garden\apples' 'c:\projects\garden\oranges' 'c:\projects\garden\tomatoes');

Yes, you can combine apples with oranges, and even with tomatoes, and that will enable you to access the SAS data sets in several libraries with one libref.

As you can see, you can combine two or more libraries by their librefs, physical names, or even a combination of librefs and physical names, such as:

libname combolib (apples oranges 'c:\projects\garden\tomatoes');

SAS will even allow using commas between the concatenated libraries:

libname combolib (apples, oranges, tomatoes);
libname combolib (apples, oranges, 'c:\projects\garden\tomatoes');

It is important to know that while SAS has no problem combining multiple libraries that contain same-named files, when you reference such a file, the concatenated libraries are searched in order and the first occurrence of the specified file is used.
This proves to be extremely useful when you have multiple versions of the same tables that you promote between different environments during a system development cycle. For example, you might have a SAS data table named SALES in either some or all of the development, testing, and production environments. You can define librefs for each environment as well as a libref for the combined environment:

libname devllib 'c:\projects\proj_x\devl';
libname testlib 'c:\projects\proj_x\test';
libname prodlib 'c:\projects\proj_x\prod';
 libname lastlib (prodlib testlib devllib);

Then when you reference your table as lastlib.SALES SAS will return the SALES table from production environment if it exists there; if not then from testing environment if it exists there; if not then from development environment it exists there. That logical hierarchy means that SAS will return the latest and greatest version of that SALES table. If you want that table from a specific environment, then you reference it using a specific libref: prodlib.SALES, testlib.SALES, or devllib.SALES.

Combining SAS Format Libraries

You can combine SAS format libraries to achieve similar version prioritization as in the above case of SAS data libraries using FMTSEARCH= System Option:

options fmtsearch=(prodlib testlib devllib);

This implies that your SAS formats are stored in the catalogs named FORMATS in the above specified libraries: prodlib.FORMATS, testlib.FORMATS, devllib.FORMATS.

One must remember that if not specified, WORK and LIBRARY libraries by default take precedence in the order in which SAS formats are searched, making the above options statement effectively look like:

options fmtsearch=(work library prodlib testlib devllib);

If WORK and LIBRARY libraries are specified in the fmtsearch= then the default is not applied and the search order is as specified.

Your turn

An unlimited space below is reserved for your contribution to the fascinating topic of combine and conquer with SAS. This is your chance to contribute to the list of coding techniques that you use to combine and conquer solving your SAS coding problems.


Combine and conquer with SAS was published on SAS Users.

4月 282017

ETL automationWhen developing SAS applications, you can feed database tables into your application by using the libname access engine either by directly referring a database table, or via SAS or database views that themselves refer to one or more of the database tables.

However, such on-the-fly data access may not be efficient enough, especially for interactive SAS applications when system response time is critical. In case of distributed systems where a database might reside on one server, and the SAS Application server – on a different physical server, user wait time caused by delays in data access across networks and databases might become intolerable. In such cases, it makes perfect sense to extract database tables and load them into SAS tables in advance, preferably placing them on (or close to) the SAS Application server. That will ensure higher operational efficiency (responsiveness) of the interactive SAS application.

SAS Data Integration Studio provides a powerful visual design tool for building, implementing, and managing data integration processes across different data sources, applications, and platforms.

However, in case of multiple tables, loading them one by one using even such a powerful tool might become a bit tedious. In an automation paradigm, being “visual” is not necessarily a good thing; when we automate it implies that we want to get things done without visualizing or even seeing them.

Here is a SAS coding approach, which I recently used for a customer project, to automate the repetitive process.

SAS code example of loading multiple Oracle tables into SAS tables

There were several Oracle tables that needed to be extracted and loaded into SAS data tables on a different physical server. The Oracle tables contained multi-year data, but we were only interested in the latest year’s data. That is those tables that have datetime stamp EVENT_DT column needed to be subset to the latest rolling 365 days.

Step 1. Creating a driver table

In order to make this process data-driven, let’s first create a driver table containing a list of the table names that needed to be extracted and loaded:

/* create table list to extract &amp; load,                */
/* dt_flag indicates whether EVENT_DT variable present */
libname parmdl '/sas/data/parmdata';
data parmdl.tablelist;
        length tname $8 dt_flag $1;
        input tname dt_flag;

This program runs just once to create the driver table parmdl.tablelist.

Step 2. Loading multiple tables

The following data-driven program runs every time when you need to reload Oracle tables into SAS:

/* source ORACLE library */
 	PASSWORD="{SAS002}D2DF612A161F7F874C4EF97F" access=readonly;
/* target SAS library */
libname sasdl '/sas/data/appdata';
/* driver table SAS library */
libname parmdl '/sas/data/parmdata';
options symbolgen mprint mlogic;
%let cutoff_date = %eval(%sysfunc(today()) - 365);
/* loop through table list to extract & load           */
%macro ETL;
   %let dsid = %sysfunc(open(parmdl.tablelist));
   %syscall set(dsid);
   %do %while(%sysfunc(fetch(&dsid)) eq 0);
      data sasdl.&tname;
         set oralib.&tname;
         %if &dt_flag eq Y %then %str(where datepart(EVENT_DT) ge &cutoff_date;);
%mend ETL;

In this code, we use a similar coding technique to that described in my earlier blog post Modifying variable attributes in all datasets of a SAS library. We loop through the initially created table parmdl.tablelist. in a macro %do-loop, and for each observation containing a single table name, implement a data step extracting one table at a time.

If macro variable &dt_flag=Y, then we generate and insert a where statement sub-setting the extracted table to the latest year’s data.

Note a very useful feature here %syscall set(dsid) that links SAS data set variables to macro variables that have the same name and data type. Since we have not defined those macro variables, in essence, it creates a namesake macro variable for each SAS data set variable.

Implementing data-driven load in SAS Data Integration Studio

The above SAS code is run on the SAS Application server – the same server where the SAS target library resides. To fully automate the ETL process, this code may be embedded into a SAS job in SAS Data Integration Studio and then scheduled via either Platform Suite for SAS or your operating system scheduler. Alternately, it can be run in batch mode or via script that that in turn can be scheduled by the operating system scheduler.

In SAS DI Studio:

1.  Create a New job and give it a meaningful name (e.g. Loading Oracle Tables into SAS Tables.)

2.  Drag & drop User Written Code transformation onto the SAS Job canvas and give it a meaningful name (e.g. ETL macro):

SAS Data Integration Studio Job

3.  Go to the Properties of this transformation and click on the Code tab, then paste your SAS code in the text entry area:

SAS DI job properties

4.  Click OK and Save your SAS Job.

Note, that we do not add Source and Target tables to the Job canvas, only User Written Code transformation. Also note, that the %ETL macro has no direct references to the database table names being extracted and loaded into SAS datasets. Instead, it receives the names of the tables to be loaded from the PARMDL.TABLELIST dataset. This makes it extremely flexible to the task of processing a completely different set of tables; all you need to do is update the table list in the driver table. No change to your SAS DI job is needed.

Now it's your turn

What is your experience with automating ETL processes? Please feel free to share it here in the Comments section.


Automating the loading of multiple database tables into SAS tables was published on SAS Users.

4月 132017
The Penitent Magdalene

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (Italian, about 1487 - 1576) The Penitent Magdalene, 1555 - 1565, Oil on canvas 108.3 × 94.3 cm (42 5/8 × 37 1/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Even if you are a traditional SAS programmer and have nothing to do with cybersecurity, you still probably have to deal with this issue in your day-to-day work.

The world has changed, and what you do as a SAS programmer is not just between you and your computer anymore. However, I have found that many of us are still careless, negligent or reckless enough to be dangerous.

Would you scotch-tape your house key to the front door next to the lock and go on vacation? Does anybody do that? Still, some of us have no problem explicitly embedding passwords in our code.

That single deadly sin, the thing that SAS programmers (or any programmers) must not do under any circumstances, is placing unmasked passwords into their code. I must confess, I too have sinned, but I have seen the light and hope you will too.

Password usage examples

Even if SAS syntax calls for a password, never type it or paste it into your SAS programs. Ever.

If you connect to a database using a SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME statement, your libname statement might look like:

libname mydblib oracle path=airdb_remote schema=hrdept
	user=myusr1 password=mypwd1;

If you specify the LIBNAME statement options for the metadata engine to connect to the metadata server, it may look like:

libname myeng meta library=mylib
	repname=temp metaserver='a123.us.company.com' port=8561 
 		user=idxyz pw=abcdefg;

If you use LIBNAME statement options for the metadata engine to connect to a database, it may look like:

libname oralib meta library=oralib dbuser=orauser dbpassword=orapw;

In all of the above examples, some password is “required” to be embedded in the SAS code. But it does not mean you should put it there “as is,” unmasked. SAS program code is usually saved as a text file, which is stored on your laptop or somewhere on a server. Anyone who can get access to such a file would immediately get access to those passwords, which are key to accessing databases that might contain sensitive information. It is your obligation and duty to protect this sensitive data.

Hiding passwords in a macro variable or a macro?

I’ve seen some shrewd SAS programmers who do not openly put passwords in their SAS code. Instead of placing the passwords directly where the SAS syntax calls for, they assign them to a macro variable in AUTOEXEC.SAS, an external SAS macro file, a compiled macro or some other SAS program file included in their code, and then use a macro reference, e.g.

/* in autoexec.sas or external macro */
%let opw = mypwd1;
/* or */
%macro opw;
%mend opw;
/* in SAS program */
libname mydblib oracle user=myusr1 password=&opw
        path=airdb_remote schema=hrdept;
/* or */
libname mydblib oracle user=myusr1 password=%opw
        path=airdb_remote schema=hrdept;

Clever! But it’s no more secure than leaving your house key under the door mat. In fact it is much less secure. One who wants to look up your password does not even need to look under the door mat, oh, I mean look at your program file where the password is assigned to a macro variable or a macro. For a macro variable, a simple %put &opw; statement will print the password’s actual value in the SAS log. In case of a macro, one can use %put %opw; with the same result.

In other words, hiding the passwords do not actually protect them.

What to do

What should you do instead of openly placing or concealing those required passwords into your SAS code? The answer is short: encrypt passwords.

SAS software provides a powerful procedure for encrypting passwords that renders them practically unusable outside of the SAS system.

This is PROC PWENCODE, and it is very easy to use. In its simplest form, in order to encrypt (encode) your password abc123 you would need to submit just the following two lines of code:

proc pwencode in="abc123";

The encrypted password is printed in the SAS log:

1 proc pwencode in=XXXXXXXX;
2 run;


Now, you can use this password {SAS002}3CD4EA1E5C9B75D91A73A37F in your SAS programs. The SAS System will seamlessly take care of decrypting the password during compilation.

The above code examples can be re-written as follows:

libname mydblib oracle path=airdb_remote schema=hrdept
	user=myusr1 password="{SAS002}9746E819255A1D2F154A26B7";
libname myeng meta library=mylib
 		user=idxyz pw="{SAS002}9FFC53315A1596D92F13B4CA";
libname oralib meta library=oralib dbuser=orauser

Encryption methods

The {SAS002} prefix indicates encoding method. This SAS-proprietary encryption method which uses 32-bit key encryption is the default, so you don’t have to specify it in the PROC PWENCODE.

There are other, stronger encryption methods supported in SAS/SECURE:

{SAS003} – uses a 256-bit key plus 16-bit salt to encode passwords,

{SAS004} – uses a 256-bit key plus 64-bit salt to encode passwords.

If you want to encode your password with one of these stronger encryption methods you must specify it in PROC PWENCODE:

proc pwencode in="abc123" method=SAS003;

SAS Log: {SAS003}50374C8380F6CDB3C91281FF2EF57DED10E6

proc pwencode in="abc123" method=SAS004;

SAS Log: {SAS004}1630D14353923B5940F3B0C91F83430E27DA19164FC003A1

Beyond encryption

There are other methods of obscuring passwords to protect access to sensitive information that are available in the SAS Business Intelligence Platform. These are the AUTHDOMAIN= SAS/ACCESS option supported in LIBNAME statements, as well as PROC SQL CONNECT statements, SAS Token Authentication, and Integrated Windows Authentication. For more details, see Five strategies to eliminate passwords from your SAS programs.


Never place unencrypted password into your SAS program. Encrypt it!

Place this sticker in front of you until you memorize it by heart.



One deadly sin SAS programmers should stop committing was published on SAS Users.