Introduction to DATA Step Functions for Metadata

Best Practices

Be careful when you modify metadata objects, because many objects have dependencies on other objects. A product like SAS Management Console or SAS Data Integration Studio is recommended for the routine maintenance of metadata. Before you modify metadata, run a full backup of repositories. For more information, see the SAS Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide. If you create a new object, the object might be unusable if you do not create the proper attributes and associations. For more information, see SAS Metadata Model: Reference.

When the metadata server returns multiple objects, they are returned in the same order as they are stored in the metadata server. Therefore, if order is important, your program must examine the objects before it acts on them.

A good programming practice is to define all variables (for example, with a LENGTH or FORMAT statement) in the DATA step before you call any functions.

For performance reasons, metadata objects are cached by URI. To refresh the metadata object with the most recent data from the metadata server, purge the URI with the METADATA_PURGE function.

For best performance, always resolve your URI into an ID instance. For example, if you make several function calls on the object "OMSOBJ:LogicalServer?@Name='foo '", first use the METADATA_RESOLVE or METADATA_GETNOBJ function to convert the object to "OMSOBJ:LogicalServer\A57DQR88.AU000003". URIs in the ID instance form can fully exploit object caching and usually require only one read from the metadata server.

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