Hi:
It looks to me like you have read the documentation:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/acpcref/61891/HTML/default/a003079774.htm
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/acreldb/63023/HTML/default/a001371624.htm
http://support.sas.com/kb/6/413.html
However, my interpretation of the notes is that you use the SASDATEFMT option either in your config file or on your LIBNAME or SET statement when you are using SAS/ACCESS or the various engines to initially READ the data from Oracle or DB2 or Microsoft Access into a SAS data set.
Once your data are in SAS data format, then I believe that the SASDATEFMT option will no longer impact the data. You would then need to use other SAS formats, functions or conversion methods to impact the date or create a new variable.
You might investigate using the DATEPART function or the TIMEPART function to create new variables, as shown in the code below.
cynthia
[pre]
data testdate;
bday_time = '15Nov1950:07:15:35'dt;
try1 = year(bday_time);
try2 = year(datepart(bday_time));
month = month(datepart(bday_time));
bday = day(datepart(bday_time));
timeval = timepart(bday_time);
run;
proc print data=testdate;
format bday_time datetime18. timeval time8.;
run;
[/pre]
Output from above program is:
[pre]
Obs bday_time try1 try2 month bday timeval
1 15NOV50:07:15:35 . 1950 11 15 7:15:35
[/pre]