Moving and Accessing SAS Files across Operating Environments

Precision and Accuracy of Files That Are Moved between Host Architectures

Regardless of the method that you use to transport a file that contains numeric data between host architectures, you may encounter problems with the precision of data values on some target hosts. This problem results from binary incompatibilities, such as differing methods for storing floating-point numbers, between host architectures.

Because transport files store numeric data in IBM floating-point format, data files that are created in IEEE-format lose precision when they are translated to transport format. UNIX, Windows, OS/2, and OpenVMS hosts store numeric data in IEEE-format while CMS and OS/390 hosts store numeric data in IBM format.

As an alternative to creating a transport file with a loss of numeric precision, you may prefer to create a CEDA file, whose internal representation does not compromise the precision of numeric data. For details about CEDA, see Using Version 8 Cross-Environment Data Access (CEDA). For details about numeric precision, see SAS Language Reference: Concepts. If you use SAS/SHARE to access SAS files, read about the topic cross-architecture access in Managing Incompatible Client/Server Host Types and SAS/SHARE User's Guide.

Furthermore, if you move a SAS file that contains character data from an ASCII-based system to an EBCDIC-based system and then back to the ASCII-based system, some print characters may be translated to values that are different from their original values.

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