Using the XPORT engine (with either the
DATA step or the COPY procedure) provides these advantages:
-
You can move files between operating
environments, regardless of whether you are moving the transport file
to a later or an earlier SAS release.
Note: Regressing a data set (moving
from a later release to an earlier release) eliminates the features
that are specific to the later release. For example, when moving from
SAS 9 to SAS 6, the long variable names in SAS 9 are truncated to
eight bytes. For details about file regression, see
Regressing SAS Data Sets to SAS 6 Format.
-
You can use the XPORT engine when
sending a transport file to a destination operating environment when
the SAS release is unknown.
-
You can create the transport file
one time and direct it to multiple target operating environments that
run different SAS releases.
The primary reason for
using the XPORT engine with the DATA step is to dynamically create
one or more data sets, to order them, and then to translate them to
transport format. By contrast, PROC COPY enables you to translate
multiple data sets that already exist in a library.