SAS maintains metadata about current assigned libraries in a number of views.
SASHELP.VTABLE has this information about all the data sets:
libname char(8) label='Library Name',
memname char(32) label='Member Name',
memtype char(8) label='Member Type',
dbms_memtype char(32) label='DBMS Member Type',
memlabel char(256) label='Data Set Label',
typemem char(8) label='Data Set Type',
crdate num format=DATETIME informat=DATETIME label='Date Created',
modate num format=DATETIME informat=DATETIME label='Date Modified',
nobs num label='Number of Physical Observations',
obslen num label='Observation Length',
nvar num label='Number of Variables',
protect char(3) label='Type of Password Protection',
compress char(8) label='Compression Routine',
encrypt char(8) label='Encryption',
npage num label='Number of Pages',
filesize num label='Size of File',
pcompress num label='Percent Compression',
reuse char(3) label='Reuse Space',
bufsize num label='Bufsize',
delobs num label='Number of Deleted Observations',
nlobs num label='Number of Logical Observations',
maxvar num label='Longest variable name',
maxlabel num label='Longest label',
maxgen num label='Maximum number of generations',
gen num label='Generation number',
attr char(3) label='Data Set Attributes',
indxtype char(9) label='Type of Indexes',
datarep char(32) label='Data Representation',
sortname char(8) label='Name of Collating Sequence',
sorttype char(4) label='Sorting Type',
sortchar char(8) label='Charset Sorted By',
reqvector char(24) format=$HEX48 informat=$HEX48 label='Requirements Vector',
datarepname char(170) label='Data Representation Name',
encoding char(256) label='Data Encoding',
audit char(3) label='Audit Trail Active?',
audit_before char(3) label='Audit Before Image?',
audit_admin char(3) label='Audit Admin Image?',
audit_error char(3) label='Audit Error Image?',
audit_data char(3) label='Audit Data Image?',
num_character num label='Number of Character Variables',
num_numeric num label='Number of Numeric Variables',
diagnostic char(256) label='Diagnostic Message from File Open Attempt'
SASHELP.VCOLUMN has
libname char(8) label='Library Name',
memname char(32) label='Member Name',
memtype char(8) label='Member Type',
name char(32) label='Column Name',
type char(4) label='Column Type',
length num label='Column Length',
npos num label='Column Position',
varnum num label='Column Number in Table',
label char(256) label='Column Label',
format char(49) label='Column Format',
informat char(49) label='Column Informat',
idxusage char(9) label='Column Index Type',
sortedby num label='Order in Key Sequence',
xtype char(12) label='Extended Type',
notnull char(3) label='Not NULL?',
precision num label='Precision',
scale num label='Scale',
transcode char(3) label='Transcoded?',
diagnostic char(256) label='Diagnostic Message from File Open Attempt'
If you want to use Proc SQL you can also reference these as Dictionary.tables and Dictionary.columns.
You may find this a helpful starting point if the question is "common variables".
proc tabulate data=sashelp.vcolumn;
where libname='WORK' and memtype='DATA';
class memname name type;
table name*type,
memname
/misstext=' '
;
run;
Replace WORK with the library name you are interested in. Since the libname is stored in upper case you want to use upper case here. This will create a report with the rows the name of variables with the type, character or numeric nested and columns the names of data sets in that library as columns. There will be a 1 indicating the intersection (a count of how many times that variable appears in that data set ).
