Introduction to Reading and Writing Data

SAS/IML Studio runs in a Microsoft Windows operating environment, but it can communicate with SAS software that runs on other computers. The PC on which SAS/IML Studio runs is called the client. The computer on which the SAS system runs is called the SAS server. If the SAS System runs on the same PC as SAS/IML Studio, then the client and server machines are the same.

Dynamically linked graphs require an in-memory DataObject that runs on the client PC. Calling a SAS procedure requires a SAS data set in a library on the server. Therefore, if you are graphically exploring data and decide to perform an analysis with a procedure, you must write data from a DataObject into a SAS data set in a server library. After the analysis is finished, you might want to read results from an output data set and add one or more variables to the in-memory DataObject. For example, you might want to add predicted values, residuals, and confidence limits for a regression analysis.

This first part of this chapter teaches you how to use the SAS/IML Studio graphical user interface (GUI) to do the following:

• read a SAS data set from the client

• read a SAS data set from the server

• write data to a SAS data set on the client

• write data to a SAS data set on the server

The second part of the chapter teaches you how to do these tasks by writing a program and also describes how to add variables to an existing DataObject.