Using the SAS Information Maps LIBNAME Engine

What Is Supported?

The Information Maps engine can only read information maps and their data sources. If you want to update an information map directly, you can use the INFOMAPS procedure or SAS Information Map Studio.

The engine supports accessing metadata in a metadata server to process the information map. Using the engine and SAS code, you can do the following:

read data that is retrieved via an information map (input processing)
create a new data set by using an information map (output processing)

Note: The new data set is created in Base SAS software, not on the data server.

The Information Maps engine does not support the following:

The engine does not pass WHERE clauses to the SAS server for processing. Therefore, all of the data that is retrieved via the information map is passed back to the SAS client. The SAS client applies the WHERE clause to restrict the data for the result set.

Performance is degraded whenever a large number of observations have to be processed by SAS. You can use information map filters to restrict the query and reduce the number of observations that must be processed. A filter contains criteria for subsetting data in an information map. For more information about filters, see FILTER= Data Set Option.
The engine does not sort data in the result set for BY-group processing. BY-group processing requires that the result set be sorted; however, the engine has no control over sorting the data. This means that you will have to manually sort the data in the result set that is supplied by the engine before you use it with a BY-group statement.

For example:
```
libname mylib infomaps ... ;

proc sort data=mylib.results_set out=work.sorted;
     by sorted_var;
run;

proc print data=work.sorted;
     by sorted_var;
run;
```
The one exception is the SQL procedure. You can use BY-group processing with the Information Maps engine's result set because the SQL procedure automatically sorts the result set before it applies the BY-group statement.
The engine does not support OLAP data.
The engine does not support updating or deleting an information map, nor does it support updating the underlying data.
The engine does not provide explicit SQL Pass-Through support.

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