From the course: SAS Essential Training: 1 Descriptive Analysis for Healthcare Research
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Explanation of SAS XPT - SAS Tutorial
From the course: SAS Essential Training: 1 Descriptive Analysis for Healthcare Research
Explanation of SAS XPT
- [Instructor] Even if you are used to dealing with SAS datasets, sometimes reading in an XPT file can throw you for a loop. So I thought I'd first explain it before we do it. As you may recall, typical SAS datasets come in the sas7bdat format. I know that seems a little long for an extension but it really is sas7bdat and how you usually work with sas7bdat files is by putting them into a directory, then mapping a LIBNAME to that directory and calling them up in code. Easy peasy. But the problem is that sas7bdat files are very bloated. If you took some data in .csv format and converted it to sas7bdat format, you'd see the file would be way bigger even though it's the exact same data. So SAS needed a way to cope with the fact that they needed to move these big datasets around. This is why they invented XPT format. It's kind of like a zip format for sas7bdat datasets. The problem is you have to unpack the XPT file into a sas7bdat file before you can work with it. Also, you need to use a…
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