Dictionary Tables and SASHELP Views:
Most of the SAS programmers think that the Metadata concepts (Dictionary tables and SASHELP views) are advanced SAS topics, in fact it is not. I tried here to explain the concept precise and clear…… Here, I will cover the following topics…… Introduction to SAS metadata How to see what’s in the tables How to use the tables, using several real-world examples Advantages What are Dictionary Tables 4 ? Dictionary tables are created and automatically maintained by SAS system at run time to store information related to SAS data libraries, SAS system options, SAS catalogs, and external files associated with the currently running SAS session. CATALOGS, COLUMNS, EXTFILES, INDEXES, MEMBERS, MACRO, OPTIONS, TABLES, TITLES, AND VIEW are these objects which provide detailed information about the SAS files. DICTIONARY tables are special read-only PROC SQL tables. They retrieve information about all the SAS data libraries, SAS data sets, SAS system options, and external files that are associat...