| Jayanth Iyengar |
One of the most common data manipulation tasks SAS® programmers perform is combining SAS datasets and though table lookups. In the SAS programmer's toolkit many constructs are available for performing table lookups. Traditional methods for performing table lookups include conditional logic, match-merging and SQL joins. In this paper I concentrate on advanced table lookup methods such as formats, HASH objects, and the PROC SQL join. I conceptually examine what advantages they provide the SAS programmer over basic methods. I also discuss and assess performance and efficiency considerations through practical examples. |