Well, yes. After the sort, you will know on the first observation per student, because Fail will be sorted before a blank (descending): data exams2; set exams; by name; retain res; if first.name then do; if result eq ' ' then result = 'Fail'; res=result; end; else if result = ' ' then result = res; drop res; run; /Linus ... View more

I think these kind of problems is kind of tricky to solve via a forum. I think that you might have more luck contacting SAS tech support. Regards, Linus ... View more

This code assumes that you have managed to import your spreadsheet to SAS. It also assumes that you don't have mixture of Pass and Fail for the same student. If this is the case, you have to develop the logic a bit in the data step. proc sort data=exams; by name descending result ; run; data exams2; set exams; by name; retain res; if first.name then res=result; else if result = ' ' then result = res; drop res; run; Hope this helps, Linus ... View more

Since our concern is locking on individual objects, I don't think SYSLIBRC will be useful, neither SYSFILRC (which tells whether a physical location/file exists or not). I might be helped with FILEMSGS in some way, but unfortunately we are in UNIX (Solaris), not z/os. I'm not sure how I am intend to use WAIT in this situation. Regards, Linus ... View more

Thanks for your quick response. But SPDE does not support the LOCK statement unfortunately, so I need something else for those libraries. /Linus ... View more

I'm not sure I understand what you try to accomplish here.If you know what words (or extracts) to search for you can start looking at the FIND function. Maybe you can give us some more examples and expected result. /Linus ... View more

As you said, there's a lot of literature, on-line doc, samples etc out there. In to explain to you, we'll need to know kind of problem you have, what is it you want to achieve? /Linus ... View more

I think SAS support will the proper way to solve this issue. /Linus ... View more

Since your CALL SYMPUT is executed within a macro, the macro variables created will be local. Try to insert a CALL EXECUTE after you have assigned your macro variable a name: %macro mymacro (loop); data _null_; set temp; macname=compress(xval||&loop); call execute('%global '||macname||';'); call symput (macname, yval*&loop); run; %mend; /Linus ... View more

I don't think that DOPEN or any other directory SAS function will do the job. Here's a sample that uses FILENAME PIPE with an OS directory listing command (such as dir or ls). http://support.sas.com/kb/24/820.html /Linus ... View more

I don't think I can help you any further. I suggest that you open a track on SAS support. /Linus ... View more

I haven't used stored procedures in DB2, so I'm on thin ice here... In DB2, dates can be represented between 0000-01-01 and 9999-12-31. In SAS, dates can range from 1582 and 20,000. My guess is that the DB2 stored procedure leave the data as numeric value (number of days after 0000-01-01), and SAS tries to interpret as number of days after 1960-01-01. Looking at your LOG, it seems that 17 rows were not truncated. If looking in SAS result table, are you finding the expected values there or not? /Linus ... View more

This note goes for date values, but I think it's aplicable for datetime values as well. What kind of datetimes do you have in your DB2 table? http://support.sas.com/kb/2/429.html /Linus ... View more

Not really. Your "AB" in table 2 will match both "ABCD" and "ABDH" in table 1, unless you specify some other specification to your matching rule. Nevertheless, your join criteria would look something like this: where table1.id eq table2.id or substr(table1.id,1,2) eq table2.id /Linus ... View more