Cross-environment
data access (CEDA) is a Base SAS feature. CEDA enables a SAS file
that was created in a directory-based operating environment (for example,
UNIX or Windows) to be processed in an incompatible environment or
under an incompatible session encoding. With CEDA, the processing
is automatic and transparent. You do not need to create a transport
file, use SAS procedures that convert the file, or change your SAS
program. CEDA supports files that were created with SAS 7 and later
releases. This documentation explains the restrictions, benefits,
and behavior of CEDA processing.
Here are a few concepts to help you understand CEDA:
is the form in which
data is stored in a particular operating environment. Different operating
environments use different standards or conventions for storing floating-point
numbers (for example, IEEE or IBM mainframe); for character encoding
(ASCII or EBCDIC); for the ordering of bytes in memory (big Endian
or little Endian); for word alignment (4-byte boundaries or 8-byte
boundaries); for integer data-type length (16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit);
and for doubles (byte-swapped or not).
is a set of characters
(letters, logograms, digits, punctuation, symbols, control characters,
and so on) that have been mapped to numeric values (called code points)
that can be used by computers. The code points are assigned to the
characters in the character set by applying an encoding method. Some
examples of encodings are Wlatin1 and Danish EBCDIC.
describes a file that
has a different data representation or encoding than the current SAS
session. CEDA enables access to many types of incompatible files.