SAS/ACCESS® Interface to CA-IDMS

SAS/ACCESS Interface to CA-IDMS brings together the resources you need for effective information delivery, and lets you put these resources to work in a dynamic, syntax-free environment. With this out-of-the-box solution, you get the power and flexibility of SAS^® to analyze and present data directly from your database.

Database integrity is not at risk because SAS/ACCESS fully supports the existing security features of CA-IDMS. Access to the database can be provided to as many, or as few, users as necessary.

With SAS/ACCESS Interface to CA-IDMS, you create a view to describe the specific data you would like to access in your SAS application. You begin by creating an access descriptor, which tells SAS the essential information about the database you want to access (i.e., the name, field names and data types). Then, you create a view descriptor to let SAS know which subsets of the data (typically specific records or fields) you would like to use as input.

Once the view is created, SAS reads the data values stored in the database just as if they were a SAS data file. You are always assured that you're using the most current data because data is read directly from the database file into your SAS application without creating an intermediate SAS data file. You save disk space because the data remains in the database. Only descriptive information is stored in the view.

Structured Query Language (SQL) can also be used to update, delete or insert data into the IMS or IDMS database you have described in your view descriptor. With SAS SQL, you can combine data from different supported databases with each other and with SAS data files to form a single output table.

In addition to creating views that describe IDMS data, SAS/ACCESS allows you to extract data directly from the database table and place the data in a SAS data file. You'll find these capabilities especially helpful if you are producing multiple reports or graphs with the same data. SAS/ACCESS Interface to CA-IDMS also includes a DATA step interface engine that provides extensions to standard SAS data step programming statements. This facilitates direct calls to the IMS hierarchical database and the IDMS network database from the SAS DATA step.