How do I append a new timestamp to an existing table, every time I run the code?

[SURIM]

Hello,

I have a program that will run on the last day of every month to see how customer segments are changing over time. What I am trying to achieve is basically a timestamp since I don't have that anywhere in the data.

I need something like shown below. Every month I want the date the count and the segment group to be appended to the existing table. The segment and count I can do, but how do I put todays date as a date every month, just appending it to the existing data and not altering what is already in the table?

segment	count	date
A	20000	2019-09-30
B	28000	2019-09-30
C	14000	2019-09-30
D	50000	2019-09-30
E	4000	2019-09-30
A	22000	2019-08-31
B	27000	2019-08-31
C	1600	2019-08-31
D	48000	2019-08-31
E	4500	2019-08-31

Release: 3.8 (Enterprise Edition)

BR

[PeterClemmensen]

Is date suppose to represent a timestamp here?

[SURIM]

Yes! I need to create a new table that holds a timestamp (date) in order to follow up over time. 

[PeterClemmensen · Accepted solution]

use PROC APPEND and do something like this

data have;
input segment $ count date :yymmdd10.;
format date yymmdd10.;
datalines;
A 20000 2019-09-30
B 28000 2019-09-30
C 14000 2019-09-30
D 50000 2019-09-30
E 4000 2019-09-30
A 22000 2019-08-31
B 27000 2019-08-31
C 1600 2019-08-31
D 48000 2019-08-31
E 4500 2019-08-31
;

/* Some data you create with todays timestamp */
data newdata;
segment='F';
count=10000;
date=today();
format date yymmdd10.;
run;

proc append base=have data=newdata;
run;

[SURIM]

Worked like a charm. Big thanks for this!

[Tom]

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@SURIM wrote:

Yes! I need to create a new table that holds a timestamp (date) in order to follow up over time. 

---

Do you want to store a DATE value or a DATETIME (aka timestamp) value?

Dates are stored as a number of days and datetime values are stored as a number of seconds.

Doesn't make much difference in the overall approach in how to append an observation to a dataset, just in the details of what value to store.