SAS | insights - The Canadian SAS User Newsletter

SAS® USER PROFILE
Names: Jim Burkhardt, Barry Hong and Craig McCulloch
Location: Hamilton, Ontario
Company: U.S. Steel Canada. Barry and Craig are in the Hamilton Works - Process Analysis and Simulation Department, whose mantra is “Enabling knowledge-based decision making.” Jim works for Corporate in the Best Practices Department.

SAS® History: In terms of platforms, we work on MVS, VMS, and Windows and primarily with Base SAS, SAS/STAT®, SAS/QC® and SAS/GRAPH®. Our total SAS work experience is 25 + 20 + 6 = 51 years.

Sports/Hobbies: The three C’s: cycling, cruising and curling. Oh, and skiing for good measure.

What your ideal weekend would be: It wouldn’t be just a weekend – we would be off the whole week!

Favourite Foods: M&Ms on Wednesdays at SAS Canada headquarters, 280 King St. E.!

If we could be anything at all (besides a SAS programmer), we would be: As a point of fact, we are not SAS programmers; rather, we are metallurgical engineers who went over to the “dark side.”

One thing every SAS programmer should know: IT never fully understands what we do, and version upgrades are always six months late! Some advice for new engineers using SAS: If you think to yourself “there has to be a better way,” there is – call us! On a more serious note an actual tech tip: We use the NOBS macro listed below to control program flow, error trapping, etc.

%macro nobs(dsn);
/******************************************************************/
/* MACRO NOBS - Retrieves the Number of Observations */
/* from dataset DSN */
/*----------------------------------------------------------------*/
/* extracted from SAS Communications and modified for two part */
/* dataset names (1994). */
/*----------------------------------------------------------------*/
/* input: dsn - a one or two part dataset name */
/* output: Nobs - macro variable containing number of */
/* observations */
/******************************************************************/
%global nobs;
%let nobs=0;
%let lib=%upcase(%scan(&dsn,1,'.'));
%let mem=%upcase(%scan(&dsn,2,'.'));
%if &mem = %then %do;
%let mem=&lib;
%let lib=WORK; /* the default one part name */
%end;

proc sql noprint;
select nobs-delobs into :nobs
from dictionary.tables
where libname="&lib" and memname="&mem";
quit;

%let nobs=%trim(&nobs);
%put ******************* MACRO: NOBS ***********************;
%put **** No. OF OBSERVATIONS FOR &LIB..&MEM is &NOBS ****;
%put **********************************************************;
%mend nobs;