Advanced Topics

Deciding How to Specify Selection Criteria in CA-Datacom/DB

Include a WHERE clause in your view descriptor when you want to do the following tasks:

Use a SAS WHERE clause when the previous guidelines do not apply and you want to do the following tasks:

have more run-time flexibility in subsetting data
use SAS WHERE clause capabilities that CA-Datacom/DB does not support, such as arithmetic expressions or truncated comparisons.

Note: Masking and delimiter characters are ignored in a SAS WHERE clause. For example,

where x='\y\a'

would cause the software to look for backslashes in the data. [cautionend]