The DROP statement drops the specified column from
an access descriptor. The column therefore cannot be selected by
a view descriptor that is based on the access descriptor. However,
the specified column in the DBMS table remains unaffected by this
statement.
An editing statement,
such as DROP, must follow the CREATE and database-description statements
when you create an access descriptor.
For more information,
see CREATE Statement.
The
column-identifier argument can be either the
column name or the positional equivalent from the LIST statement,
which is the number that represents the column's place in the access
descriptor. For example, to drop the third and fifth columns, submit
the following statement:
drop 3 5;
If the column name contains
special characters or national characters, enclose the name in quotation
marks. You can drop as many columns as you want in one DROP statement.
To display a column
that was previously dropped, specify that column name in the RESET
statement. However, doing so also resets all the column's attributes
(such as SAS variable name, format, and so on) to their default values.