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SAS File Features

Migration

SAS®9 File Features Not Supported in Previous Releases: Details

Long names for variables
are not supported in Version 6.
Best practice

Set OPTIONS VALIDVARNAME=V6 to get an error message.


Encoding attribute
is not supported in Version 6. Version 7 and 8 data sets must be updated or output in a SAS 9 session to be stamped with an encoding attribute. (The encoding attribute was supported prior to SAS 9 in China, Korea, and Japan.)

The encoding attribute enables you to, for example, more easily process multilingual data in a single SAS session with the UTF8 session encoding. See the topic about National Language Support (NLS).

Long names for formats and informats
are not supported in Version 6, 7, or 8.
Best practice

Set OPTIONS VALIDVARNAME=V6 to get an error message. If you specify the V7 or V8 engine, such as in a LIBNAME statement, SAS automatically uses the VALIDVARNAME=V6 behavior. Under Version 6, use of long format names automatically causes a failure as well.


Greater than 32,767 variables
is not supported prior to SAS 9.1.

Suppressed transcoding of a specified variable
is not supported prior to SAS 9.1.

CHECK integrity constraints created in SAS 9.2
are not compatible with earlier releases of SAS. If you add the constraint to an existing SAS data set or create a SAS data set that includes the constraint, the data set cannot be accessed by any release prior to SAS 9.2.

sas003 encoding method in SAS 9.2
In SAS 9.2, the PWENCODE procedure introduced the sas003 encoding method. If you encode a password with the sas003 encoding method, the data set cannot be accessed by any release prior to SAS 9.2.

linguistic collation with the SORT procedure in SAS 9.2
When you use SORTSEQ=LINGUISTIC with PROC SORT in SAS 9.2, metadata is stored in the data set header to indicate that the data set was sorted. Previous releases do not support linguistic collation. If you use the sorted data set in previous releases, the data set is not shown to be sorted, and the COMPARE procedure might show differences due to the sort assertion. The data set can be accessed.