Overview of Base SAS Software

Base SAS software contains the following:

A data management facility

A programming language

Data analysis and reporting utilities

Knowledge to use Base SAS enables you to work with these features of SAS. It also prepare you to learn other SAS products, because all SAS products go behind the same basic rules.

Data Management Facility

SAS organizes data into a rectangular form or table that is called a SAS data set. The following figure shows a SAS data set. The data describe participant in a 16-week weight program at a health and fitness club. The data for each participant includes a recognition number, name, team name, and weight (in U.S. pounds) at the beginning and end of the program.

In a SAS data set, each row represents information about an individual entity and is called an observation. Each column represents the same type of information and is called a variable. Each separate piece of information is a data value. In a SAS data set, an surveillance contains all the data values for an entity; a variable contains the same type of data value for all entities.

To put up a SAS data set with Base SAS, you write a program that uses statements in the SAS programming language. A SAS program that begins with a DATA statement and usually creates a SAS data set or a report is called a DATA step.

The following SAS program creates a SAS data set named WEIGHT_CLUB from the

Health club data:

The following list corresponds to the numbered items in the previous program:

..The DATA statement tells SAS to begin structure a SAS data set named WEIGHT_CLUB.

..The INPUT statement identifies the fields to be read from the input data and names the SAS variables to be created from them (Id Number, Name, Team, Start Weight, and End Weight).

..The third statement is an project statement. It calculates the weight each person lost and assigns the effect to a new variable, Loss. X The DATALINES statement indicates that data lines follow.

..The data lines follow the DATALINES statement. This approach to processing raw data is useful when you have only a few lines of data

..The semicolon signals the end of the raw data, and is a step boundary. It tells SAS that the previous statements are ready for execution.

Reminder : By default, the data set WEIGHT_CLUB is temporary; that is, it exists only for the current job or session.