topic Re: allocate a sas library from zip file in SAS Programming

allocate a sas library from zip file

LineMoon — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 20:41:50 GMT

Hello,

Is it possible to allocate a sas library - in sas 9.2 - from a zip file.

likes this :

Libname lib "c:/toto/dir.zip" ; ?

is it the avantage or not ?

If I have a dirctory dir1 in dir.zip, is it also to do : libname lib1 " /dir1" ?

Thank you

Re: allocate a sas library from zip file

Kurt_Bremser — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 07:56:39 GMT

Plainly, no.

Standard libraries in UNIX need to be directories in the filesystem. To access a.zip file as if it was a directory, one would need a special engine; no such engine is present in SAS.

See SAS 9.4 Companion for UNIX Environments, LIBNAME statement

If you have a tool that lets you mount a .zip file into the UNIX filesystem (as if it was a physical disk or a network resource), you could use that (X statement) first and then define the libname. Don't know if such a tool exists.

Also keep in mind that writing to such a library would consume ample resources. I consider it better and much more performant to unpack the zipped contents, run SAS, and then re-zip the data.

Re: allocate a sas library from zip file

RW9 — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 10:20:07 GMT

Yes, I believe currently its only possible to create ZIP files from SAS, not read from them:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/odsug/65308/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p19kppnlyy01n7n18jcfsy0eutvq.htm

As I am sure your data will be stored in a some sort of versioned controlled, access restricted system however, so you would need to extract all the data in to that system first before accessing it from SAS.

Re: allocate a sas library from zip file

Doc_Duke — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 16:05:23 GMT

Also, check out this blog post

http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2016/03/04/add-files-to-a-zip-archive-with-filename-zip/