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SAS File Features

Migration

SAS File Features Not Supported in Previous Releases: Details

Extended naming for data sets, views, and item stores

is supported in SAS 9.3 and later. For details, see the chapter about rules for SAS data set names, view names, and item store names in SAS Language Reference: Concepts.

Best practice

Set the system option VALIDMEMNAME=COMPATIBLE to enforce naming that is compatible with releases prior to SAS 9.3. Messages are printed in the log when names cannot be transcoded.

CHECK integrity constraints

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

If you use the PWENCODE procedure to 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

When you use SORTSEQ=LINGUISTIC with PROC SORT in SAS 9.2 and later, 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.

Greater than 32,767 variables

is supported in SAS 9.1 and later.

Suppressed transcoding of a specified variable

is supported in SAS 9.1 and later.

Long names for formats and informats

is supported in SAS 9.0 and later.

Best practice

Set VALIDFMTNAME=FAIL to get an error message for names that exceed the limit. If you specify the V7 or V8 engine, such as in a LIBNAME statement, SAS automatically uses the VALIDFMTNAME=FAIL behavior. Under SAS 6, use of long format names automatically causes a failure.

Encoding attribute

is not supported in SAS 6. SAS 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 variables

are not supported in SAS 6.

Best practice

Set OPTIONS VALIDVARNAME=V6 to get an error message.