topic Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset in SAS Programming

How to retrieve these information of a dataset

JohnChen_TW — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 16:23:03 GMT

Hi everyone, I'm using SAS 9.3.

Does anyone have suggestions to retrieve "label", "size in byte", "observations (total rows)" and "created date" of a dataset, and also print it out?

Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset

thomp7050 — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 16:25:07 GMT

PROC SQL;
CREATE TABLE COLNAMES AS SELECT * 
FROM DICTIONARY.COLUMNS 
LEFT JOIN DICTIONARY.TABLES TABLES ON TABLES.MEMNAME = COLUMNS.MEMNAME
WHERE TABLES.MEMNAME = 'FLARM';
QUIT;

To get the total number of answers, you may want to create a looping macro to select count(case when col1 is not null then 1 else 0 end) for each of the variables, depending on their data type, and update your columns table.

Patrick

Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset

Reeza — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 18:15:04 GMT

To add to @thomp7050 correct answer, use SASHELP.Vtable for information on a dataset and SASHELP.vcolumn for information on variables within a specific dataset. These are also known as dictionary.table and dictionary.column but you can't navigate to those, so I use the SASHELP convention to denote this.

Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset

thomp7050 — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 18:18:03 GMT

Thank you, Reeza. You have added to my knowledge today.

Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset

JohnChen_TW — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 01:47:40 GMT

Thanks for your suggestion.

But I'd like to print the label on dataset (shown as below), not column label.

How to create another dataset to save "label on dataset as above", file size, created date, and observations?

Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset

Reeza — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 03:39:48 GMT

Did you look at SAS.VTABLE? The field called memlabel holds the label. This works for my example below

data test (label='mydata');
set sashelp.class;
run;


PROC SQL;
CREATE TABLE info AS 
SELECT * 
FROM SASHELP.VTABLE
WHERE libname='WORK' and MEMNAME = 'TEST';
QUIT;

Re: How to retrieve these information of a dataset

JohnChen_TW — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 06:38:43 GMT

Many thanks for your resolution.
I am not good at proc SQL, actually.

JC