topic converting a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision in SAS Programming

converting a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision

Quodly — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 14:14:50 GMT

hello,

i use the odbc engine to retrieve data from a snowflake table. it contains a variable x of integers which seem to lose precision in sas. for example:

y = put(x, best32. -l);

i think that this is related to this question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10933725/long-digit-reading-in-sas

as i do not use proc import, this does not help me much, though.

is it possible to convert a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision?

Re: converting a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision

ballardw — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 15:30:43 GMT

SAS precision for large numbers means that you will need to do the conversion before bringing it into SAS. Possibly export the data from the other data source and then read the data with a data step as character.

Re: converting a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision

SASKiwi — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 23:58:01 GMT

Snowflake SQL contains functions to do column type conversions: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/functions-conversion.html

Just add the required conversion from numeric to character (VARCHAR) in a SAS passthru SQL query and then SAS will read the character version without any precision loss.