Definition of Cross-Environment Data Access (CEDA)

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:
data representation
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).
encoding
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.
incompatible
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.