Best way to transfer data between SAS and Mathematica?

[Ivan55Boston]

At my company we have some SAS data sets that we would like to work with in Mathematica and vice versa.  Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to transfer data between SAS and Mathematica?  Thanks!

[Kurt_Bremser]

Out of experience, I advise any textual file format that both applications can process.

With SAS, this means you can create and read fixed-width columns and any kind of delimited (comma, semicolon, tabs, ...) format. One of these should also work with Mathematica.

From what a quick google search gave me, tab- or comma-separated should be fine.

[Reeza]

I'd probably write it to a sqlite db and then read it from there. I hate ensuring types are the same and that's one things that DB are the same....and the CREATE statements from a DESCRIBE statement work well in SQL as well.

[HarperCorditt]

SAS typically recommends that you export a SAS data set to another application by first converting the data set into what is known as a "transport file" (which is essentially a text file) that can then (usually) be imported by another application, such as Mathematica.  Mathematica does provide support for reading SAS transport files.  However, this method has its drawbacks, in that the user-defined formatting and other metadata in your SAS data set may not be properly converted.  And if your SAS data set contains dates and/or date-times, those values are likely to cause problems when you try to import the transport file into another application. As an alternative, you might want to consider using a Mathematica add-on called M2SLink.  M2SLink lets you directly import SAS data sets into Mathematica without having to use SAS Transport files.  This way of transferring your SAS data to Mathematica is much faster, all your user formats and metadata are preserved, and your dates and times are automatically converted to be consistent with Mathematica.  M2SLink also allows you to export your Mathematica data directly to a SAS data set.  Here is a link to the M2SLink add-on:

https://www.harpercorditt.com/

[Ivan55Boston]

Thank you.  That was very helpful.  It sounds like a seamless way to transfer data.  I will take a look at M2SLink.