Cody’s Data Cleaning Techniques Using SAS® Software

Introduction

It was a hard decision whether to group all the PROC SQL approaches together in one chapter or to include an SQL solution in each of the other chapters. I opted for the former. PROC SQL (Structured Query Language) is an alternative to the traditional DATA step and PROC approaches used in this book up to this point. PROC SQL is sometimes easier to program and more efficient, sometimes less so, sometimes extremely less efficient (as with full joins). In this chapter, many of the data cleaning operations you performed earlier with DATA step and PROC solutions will be revisited. Be careful, some SAS programmers get carried away with PROC SQL and try to solve every problem with it. It is extremely powerful and useful, but it is not always ...