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

WHERE Clause in the View Descriptor
SAS WHERE Clause

WHERE Clause in the View Descriptor

Include a WHERE clause in your view descriptor when you want to do the following tasks:
  • restrict users of view descriptors to certain subsets of data
  • use CA-Datacom/DB syntax and functionality, such as masking or delimiters
  • prevent users from sequentially passing the entire CA-Datacom/DB table.

SAS WHERE Clause

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.
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