Comparing SAS 9 to Earlier Releases

To provide longer filenames and variable names, the file format used in SAS 7 and SAS 8 is different from the file format used in SAS 6.

For SAS 9, the file format is basically the same as in SAS 7 and SAS 8. The Base SAS engine is the same engine, except that for SAS 9, you can define and use longer format and informat names and have more than 32,767 variables in a SAS data set. You cannot use these features in SAS 7 or SAS 8.

SAS files created with SAS 7 and SAS 8 are compatible with SAS 9. However, a SAS file that is created with a 32-bit version of SAS has a different data representation than a SAS file from a 64-bit version of SAS. The data representation is the format in which data is represented on a computer architecture or in an operating environment. Therefore, if you have SAS files that were created on a 32-bit version of SAS and you have upgraded to a 64-bit version of SAS, you have processing limitations due to the different data representation.

A filename extension reflects the engine that was used to create both the file and the SAS file member type.

Because SAS needs to distinguish among the different file types and versions, SAS automatically assigns a specific extension to each file when the file is created. For example, in order to distinguish SAS 7 and SAS 8 files from SAS 6 files, the extensions are different.

For SAS 9, the file extensions are the same as the file extensions in SAS 7 and SAS 8.

The following table lists the file extensions for a SAS data file (SAS data set with member type DATA) in SAS 6, SAS 7, SAS 8, and SAS 9 for different operating environments: