Length of character variable in existing SAS table

[lbarwick]

I have an existing SAS table that is produced from my company's SQL database. One of the fields contains each record's audit trail and I am trying to parse that field for reporting purposes. When I read the table into SAS the length, format, and informat are 2000 which is truncating some of the data contained in the field. I have tried changing the length, format, and informat as follows:

data want;

length audit $ 10000; informat audit $10000.; format audit $10000.;

set datain.have;

run;

But, the result is still a truncation at 2000 characters. I'm assuming there is nothing else I can do in SAS and need to contact the SQL DB admin to change the format of the field in the source data set.

Thoughts?

[tomrvincent]

read the database with explicit passthru SQL. It should create the text field with the appropriate length.

[Tom]

If you are reading the data from a remote database check or change the setting for DBMAX_TEXT  option on the libname or connect statement.  SAS will normally truncate long character values to that maximum length before moving the data to SAS.