BLOB data type

[deleted_user]

Is the BLOB data type available in SAS Base? I am trying to concatenate patient notes for multiple records. For example, a patient has 50 records, each with a clinical note that may be up to 40K characters. If I combine all notes into one record then I could have up to 400K characters. I have written a program in VBA to do this but I am running into a field size issue. Can I use the BLOB data type to combine a patient's multiple notes into one note? Thanks.

[LinusH]

There is no actual BLOB data type in Base SAS, but is has been considered for SPDS. You can read BLOB data types from external RDBMS, but the SAS/ACCESS engine will convert them into char variables. Since the maximum length for char in Base SAS is 32K, I guess you have to split your data into several rows/columns. Apart from that, you have an observation lenght limit to handle: 2GB.

/Linus