converting a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision

[Quodly]

hello,

i use the odbc engine to retrieve data from a snowflake table. it contains a variable x of integers which seem to lose precision in sas. for example:

y = put(x, best32. -l);

i think that this is related to this question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10933725/long-digit-reading-in-sas 

as i do not use proc import, this does not help me much, though.

is it possible to convert a numeric snowflake variable into a sas character variable without losing precision?

[ballardw]

SAS precision for large numbers means that you will need to do the conversion before bringing it into SAS. Possibly export the data from the other data source and then read the data with a data step as character.

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

Snowflake SQL contains functions to do column type conversions: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/sql-reference/functions-conversion.html

Just add the required conversion from numeric to character (VARCHAR) in a SAS passthru SQL query and then SAS will read the character version without any precision loss.