Mastering the SAS DS2 Procedure: Advanced Data-Wrangling Techniques, 2nd Edition

Enhance your SAS^® data-wrangling skills with high-precision and parallel data manipulation using the DS2 programming language.

Now in its second edition, this book addresses the DS2 programming language from SAS, which combines the precise procedural power and control of the Base SAS^® DATA step language with the simplicity and flexibility of SQL. DS2 provides simple, safe syntax for performing complex data transformations in parallel and enables manipulation of native database data types at full precision. It also covers PROC FEDSQL, a modernized SQL language that blends perfectly with DS2. You will learn to harness the power of parallel processing to speed up CPU-intensive computing processes in Base SAS and how to achieve even more speed by processing DS2 programs on massively parallel database systems. Techniques for leveraging internet APIs to acquire data, avoiding large data movements when working with data from disparate sources, and leveraging DS2’s new data types for full-precision numeric calculations are presented, with examples of why these techniques are essential for the modern data wrangler.

Here’s what’s new in this edition:

• how to significantly improve performance by using the new SAS^® Viya^® architecture with its SAS^® Cloud Analytic Services (CAS)
• how to declare private variables and methods in a package
• the new PROC DSTODS2
• the PCRXFIND and PCRXREPLACE packages

While working though the code samples provided with this book, you will build a library of custom, reusable, and easily shareable DS2 program modules, execute parallelized DATA step programs to speed up a CPU-intensive process, and conduct advanced data transformations using hash objects and matrix math operations.

This book is part of the SAS Press Series.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Introduction to the DS2 Language
Chapter 3: DS2 Data Program Details
Chapter 4: User-Defined Methods and Packages
Chapter 5: Predefined Packages
Chapter 6: Parallel Processing in DS2
Chapter 7: Performance Tuning in DS2