Making changes with Proc SQL

Proc SQL offers users the option of deleting, altering, and updating records. Along with looking at examples of how to do this in Proc SQL, we will also talk about alternatives that are available in SAS. We will use our 36 million record dataset to also try to understand the time that was taken to complete these tasks. Although the number of records is high, please beware that it is a long table, not a wide one. In practice, tables will be wider, and the time that it would take to process a typical table with such a structure may be longer.

Deleting

The general form of the DELETE statement is as follows:

  DELETE FROM table – name
    <WHERE expression>;

Here, we have the following...