Assessing Potential Changes in Advance

Before you use PROC METALIB to update existing table metadata, it is a good idea to execute the procedure with the NOEXEC and REPORT statements. The NOEXEC statement tells the procedure not to actually add, update, or delete any metadata. The REPORT statement tells the procedure to create a report that explains what actions it would have taken if the NOEXEC statement had not been present. If you want to make all of the changes that are shown in the report, you can then remove the NOEXEC statement and rerun the procedure to update the metadata.

The following example shows how to use the NOEXEC and REPORT statements to assess potential metadata changes:

proc metalib;
  omr (library="lib1" repname="Foundation" );
  update_rule=(delete);
  noexec;
  report;
run;