One of the more commonly needed operations within SAS® programming is to determine the value of one variable based on the value of another. A series of techniques and tools have evolved over the years to make the matching of these values go faster, smoother, and easier. A majority of these techniques require operations such as sorting, searching, and comparing. As it turns out, these types of techniques are some of the more computationally intensive, and consequently an understanding of the operations involved and a careful selection of the specific technique can often save the user a substantial amount of computing resources.
This workshop will demonstrate, compare, and contrast the following techniques: IF-THEN, IF-THEN-ELSE, SELECT, user defined formats (PUT function), MERGE, SQL joins, merging with two SET statements, using the KEY= option, use of ARRAYS, and Key-Indexing.
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