Most efficient way to find a change in data

[dlazer1]

Hi,

I am working with data and want to make sure I have it coded correctly. I have a company ID and partner ID and date. I want to see when the partner ID changes for each company ID. How would I do that?

Thank you!

[Reeza]

It depends a bit, are you expecting it to never change? If so you can easily detect that by looking at the max/min values via SQL which operate on character variables as well. If you want to just identify changes you can use BY group processing.

Try this to get you started - note the NOTSORTED option because I'm assuming your data is in order of date, but not necessarily in order by partnerID.

data want;
set have;
by companyID partnerID notsorted;

if first.partnerID and not first.companyID then flag=1;
else flag=0;

run;

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@dlazer1 wrote:

Hi,

I am working with data and want to make sure I have it coded correctly. I have a company ID and partner ID and date. I want to see when the partner ID changes for each company ID. How would I do that?

Thank you!

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