topic Re: about sashelp.vcolumn in SAS Programming

about sashelp.vcolumn

HannaZhang — Mon, 24 May 2021 08:12:46 GMT

Hi,all

I want to know how to resume the original view after sashelp.vcolumn rewrited.

I tried like this,but there was error "Could not be built sashelp.vcolumn.view,because sashelp.vcolumn.data is already exists." in the log .

Thanks

proc sql;
create view sashelp.vcolumn as 
select * from DICTIONARY.COLUMNS;
quit;

Re: about sashelp.vcolumn

Kurt_Bremser — Mon, 24 May 2021 10:08:23 GMT

In a properly set up SAS environment, you (as an "ordinary" user) cannot write anything in SASHELP.

Re: about sashelp.vcolumn

ballardw — Mon, 24 May 2021 17:05:59 GMT

Dictionary.Columns is sashelp.vcolumn

SASHELP.vcolumn is a data view, not a data set, maintained by SAS. Views have different rules for creation than data sets, one of which is "if it exists you can't overwrite it". And you should not even try with any of the views in SASHELP.

Re: about sashelp.vcolumn

HannaZhang — Tue, 25 May 2021 05:57:01 GMT

But I did update the sashelp.vcolumn by data step.Now the sashelp.vcolumn can not revert the origin version ,which is I am trying to do.

Re: about sashelp.vcolumn

HannaZhang — Tue, 25 May 2021 07:24:51 GMT

Thanks for the reminder，I found a way of reverting the sashelp.vcolumn to the original version.

Re: about sashelp.vcolumn

aditya0907 — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 11:41:40 GMT

Hi, how did you retrieve vcolumn. I've a similar issue where vcolumn got replaced by a dataset !!

Re: about sashelp.vcolumn

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 15:34:07 GMT

How could anyone who is not running the SAS install user replace this? The whole installation tree should only be writable by the SAS installation user.

And you NEVER (as in NEVER) run SAS as the installation user.

Since SASHELP.VCOLUMN is a SQL view of DICTIONARY.COLUMNS, you can recreate it like this:

proc sql;
create view vcolumn as select * from dictionary.columns;
quit;

proc compare
  base=sashelp.vcolumn
  compare=vcolumn
;
run;

(I used the PROC COMPARE to prove that it created a correct replica in SAS On Demand).

By creating the view as SASHELP.VCOLUMN (after first removing the erroneous dataset), you should be able to recreate the view.

In a default SAS installation, the .sas7bvew file is contained in the

SASFoundation/9.4/sashelp

subdirectory of your SAS installation tree.