How to assign a UUID to a data set

[sunshineca55]

Have you ever assigned a universal unique identification (UUID) to a data set in SAS 9.4 or SAS EG? We need to prep our datasets for SQL database and we need to make sure each observation from one data set share the same UUID that is different from all other datasets.

[ballardw · Accepted solution]

What you describe sounds like you want UUID per observation.

If you mean to add an identifier then you may be looking for the UUIDGEN function. The example data set creates a 32 character id using the function. If you don't assign a length for the variable it will default to 200 characters.

data example;
   length id $ 32;
   do i=1 to 10;
      id = uuidgen();
     output;
   end;
run;
   

If you want the same value for all records in a data set you would use something like

data want;
   set have;
   length id $ 32;
   retain id;
   if _n_=1 then id = uuidgen();
run;

Or generate a single value one record data set and use a join in Proc SQL to add the value to all the records.

[sunshineca55]

Thank you so much, this worked really well 🙂