An engine is a component
of SAS software that reads from or writes to a file. The SAS Data in HDFS engine
is write-only for data and read-write for metadata information such
as variable attributes. Each engine enables SAS to access files that
are in a particular format. There are several types of SAS engines.
You use the SAS Data in HDFS engine
like other SAS data access engines. That is, you execute a LIBNAME
statement to assign a libref and to specify the engine. You then use
that libref throughout the SAS session where a libref is valid to
transfer data to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or to retrieve
information about a table in HDFS.