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deleted_user
Not applicable
We have a telephone surveying tool called Blaise® (a powerful computer-assisted interviewing (CAI) system and survey processing tool for the Windows® operating system) All the surveyed data is collected into this system and processed into SAS. Currently we create ASCII files from Blaise to import into SAS. Going forward we would like to be able to connect directly to the Blaise database from within SAS. Is this possible. There are some Blaise API I read about, can I call these from within SAS. Or can I use SAS/Access to be able to connect to the Blaise system. If you can point me to any lead that would give me good start.

thanks for your help
Snk
4 REPLIES 4
Cynthia_sas
SAS Super FREQ
Hi:
According to this site, Blaise training and other information, including user group information is available in the US through Westat:
http://www.westat.com/statistical_software/blaise/system.cfm
http://www.westat.com/statistical_software/blaise/faq.cfm
http://www.westat.com/statistical_software/blaise/index.cfm
http://www.westat.com/statistical_software/blaise/capabilities.cfm

In addition, it looks like Blaise has a way to create SAS data descriptions with a product called Cameleon:
Cameleon is a meta data system and language that can recast Blaise data descriptions into one for SAS, SPSS, or other statistical packages or database languages. You can also use Cameleon to create customized translation setups for your organization's needs.


I don't know whether you can connect directly to the Blaise database with SAS. This is a question for Blaise Technical Support. It depends on whether the Blaise database is a standard database (such as Oracle, or DB2, etc) or whether the Blaise database is accessible via DDE or ODBC or OLE-DB.

SAS/Access allows connections via many standard data base formats (via Oracle, Sybase, DB2, etc) and also allows connections to be made via ODBC and OLE-DB. You would have to find out whether Blaise supports either ODBC calls or OLE-DB calls and/or whether Blaise uses a standard database system that is supported by a SAS/Access interface.

cynthia
deleted_user
Not applicable
Thank you Cynthia.
True we can use Cameleon for export into SAS from Blaise. But we would like to give more control to the SAS programmers to be able to pull data from Blaise. (What we are hoping for is to read the Blaise dataset directly from SAS without creating files like txt or XML as a middle step).
One of the Blaise developers in my firm told me that there may be a way to access data from the Blaise System if you can call Blaise API from SAS. I am assuming it would be similar to the windows API. If you can guide me to how to open/call APIs from within SAS, I think this would be a good starting point.
thank you again.
Snk.
Cynthia_sas
SAS Super FREQ
Hi:
You might look in the
Integration Technologies documentation http://support.sas.com/rnd/itech/updates/913/dev_guide_sp4_2.pdf
or,
here's an example of using the Microsoft Data Link API
http://support.sas.com/documentation/tools/oledb/cd_datalink.htm
or,
an example of testing a SAS ADO connection
http://support.sas.com/kb/25/633.html
or
in the "Developing a Client Application" documentation
http://support.sas.com/rnd/itech/doc/dist-obj/index.html

I think the complication of all of these approaches is that the examples mostly seem to be using SAS as the data provider. And, you want Blaise to be the data provider.

Generally, with SAS, when you have a non-SAS component as a data provider, you are either using SAS/Access for that product or you are using SAS/Access for ODBC or SAS/Access for OLE-DB.

In this document, on page 12, it mentions a Blaise OLE-DB interface
https://www.blaise.com/ibuc2006papers/papers%5C191.pdf
and this paper shows a WinBatch application that access Blaise data (but seems to use SAS in batch behind the scenes)
https://www.blaise.com/ibuc2006papers/papers%5C121.pdf

This paper talks about an export system used by the Census Bureau
http://www.blaiseusers.org/ibucpdfs/2001/Guan--IBUC_paper.pdf

If there is a way to directly access Blaise data with SAS, I expected I would find some mention of it on Google or at the Blaise User group site. But there did not seem to be much out there .

Perhaps your best bet for help would be to contact Blaise Technical Support.

cynthia
deleted_user
Not applicable
Thank you Cynthia.
I will go through the links you provided. And also will try to contact Blaise support and see if I can get some leads.

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