SAS Certification Prep Guide, 4th Edition

Comparing Procedures That Produce Detail Reports

Overview

When you want to produce a detail report, you can choose between the PRINT procedure and the SQL procedure:

Procedure	Description
PROC PRINT	can calculate column sums
PROC SQL	can manipulate data and create a SAS data set in the same step that creates the report can calculate column and row statistics

To perform a particular task, a single-purpose tool like PROC PRINT generally uses fewer computer resources than a multi-purpose tool like PROC SQL.

To illustrate the differences in resource usage between PROC PRINT and PROC SQL, consider some sample queries.

Example: Using PROC PRINT and PROC SQL to Create Detail Reports

Suppose you are ...