topic Re: Read SAS file without any SAS installation in .net 4.6 in SAS Health and Life Sciences

Read SAS file without any SAS installation in .net 4.6

vasantparab0 — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 08:02:14 GMT

We are able to read SAS file in dot net with installation of SAS universal viewer 9.4.

But Is it possible to read SAS dataset without installing any SAS software? If yes how is it possible.

Thanks.

Re: Read SAS file without any SAS installation in .net 4.6

RW9 — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 08:51:53 GMT

SAS datasets and catalogs are proprietary file formats. To do something like this you would need to know the binary format and implement a reader for them, and to do that you would need a license. If you have a SAS licence then contact SAS support as I believe Chris Hemedinger has at least a basic working version of this (EG in this instance):

http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/customtasks/book/

http://www.sas.com/storefront/aux/en/spcustomtaskseg/61874_excerpt.pdf

So there is some interoperability.

Also, I know there are R packages that can read SAS files.

You could of course store your data in open source text files, such as CSV/XML which would then be available to any system on any platform and be human readable as well, this was avoiding a lot of the pitfalls of proprietary file formats entirely.

Re: Read SAS file without any SAS installation in .net 4.6

vasantparab0 — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 10:11:52 GMT

To give more details about the requirement:

I got the task to extract data from a sas7bdat-file,without any SAS product installaion on our system.

Could anyone please tell me, if (and how) it is possible to read data from remotely (over network) saved sas7bdat files?

Is a installation of SAS related any product necessary? If yes, which product?

Thanks.