Base Procedures That Are Enhanced for In-Database Processing

In-database processing has several advantages over processing within SAS. These advantages include increased security, reduced network traffic, and the potential for faster processing. Increased security is possible because sensitive data does not have to be extracted from the DBMS. Faster processing is possible for the following reasons:

Data is manipulated locally, on the DBMS, using high-speed secondary storage devices instead of being transported across a relatively slow network connection.
The DBMS might have more processing resources at its disposal.
The DBMS might be capable of optimizing a query for execution in a highly parallel and scalable fashion.

In the third maintenance release for SAS 9.2, Base SAS procedures were enhanced to process data inside the Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), DB2 under UNIX, and Oracle database management systems (DBMS). In SAS 9.3, procedures have been enhanced to also process data inside the Netezza DBMS. The in-database procedures are used to generate more sophisticated queries that allow the aggregations and analytics to be run inside the database.

All of these in-database procedures generate SQL queries. You use SAS/ACCESS or SQL as the interface to the Teradata EDW.

The following Base SAS procedures support in-database processing.

In-Database Base Procedures

Procedure		Description
PROC FREQ in Base SAS(R) 9.3 Procedures Guide: Statistical Procedures		Produces one-way to n-way tables; reports frequency counts; computes test and measures of association and agreement for two-way to n-way crosstabulation tables; can compute exact tests and asymptotic tests; can create output data sets.
PROC MEANS		Computes descriptive statistics; can produce printed output and output data sets. By default, PROC MEANS produces printed output.
PROC RANK		Computes ranks for one or more numeric variables across the observations of a SAS data set; can produce some rank scores.
PROC REPORT		Combines features of the PRINT, MEANS, and TABULATE procedures with features of the DATA step in a single report-writing tool that can produce a variety of reports.
PROC SORT		Orders SAS data set observations by the values of one or more character or numeric variables.
PROC SUMMARY		Computes descriptive statistics; can produce a printed report and create an output data set. By default, PROC SUMMARY creates an output data set.
PROC TABULATE		Displays descriptive statistics in tabular format, using some or all of the variables in a data set.

For more information, see “In-Database Procedures in Teradata” in SAS/ACCESS for Relational Databases: Reference.