topic What is a member? in New SAS User

What is a member?

Paul_de_Barros — Fri, 28 May 2021 13:26:24 GMT

I have an xlsx file that appears to be output from a SAS process. It contains one worksheet with a table of data. The column headers in the table of data are varnum, memname, name, label, type, length, format, and thru_dt. All of the values in the memname column are the same string.

Question 1: I know that memname means member name, but what is a member? Is it a library? A variable? A dataset? An observation? Does it depend on the context?

Question 2: This appears to be output from PROC CONTENTS. Does that sound right? If so, what does memname mean in this context?

Re: What is a member?

Ksharp — Fri, 28 May 2021 13:40:06 GMT

memname stands for
1) table name
2) view name
3) category name
......

Member Type

CATALOG
DATA
ITEMSTOR
MDDB
VIEW

Re: What is a member?

PaigeMiller — Fri, 28 May 2021 13:42:24 GMT

If it is from PROC CONTENTS, then MEMNAME is the data set name.

The data set is a member of a library.

Re: What is a member?

Cynthia_sas — Fri, 28 May 2021 14:35:18 GMT

Hi:
Just as your regular city library has mostly books, but it also has newspapers and magazines, a SAS library mostly has datasets which have a member type of DATA. But SAS libraries can also contain catalogs, formats, item stores (such as template stores) and other SAS-specific objects. A SAS library can contain more than just datasets. Because of this a SAS library will identify the member name (memname) and member type (type) in the CONTENTS or PROC DATASETS output.
Cynthia