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.