Moving and Accessing SAS Files across Operating Environments

Using CEDA to Create and Read Version 8 Supported Member Types

CEDA is a Version 8 facility that allows you to create and to read supported member types in all Version 8 operating environments, except CMS.

An alternative to traditional transport methods, CEDA eliminates the steps that have been required to move a SAS file between the native internal representations of incompatible hosts. This quick file-access feature of CEDA is one aspect of the Version 8 vision of the computing environment in which different computers share access to common files in a network system.

Supported Member Types

CEDA supports these SAS member types:

Data set
PROC SQL view¹
MDDB (Multi-dimensional Data Base)¹

¹ CEDA supports PROC SQL views and MDDBs for read-only access.

How CEDA Works

You use CEDA to create a file in order to designate a file format to be other than the format of the source host. This process assigns a non-native (or foreign) format to the file being created. For example, from a UNIX host, you can create a SAS data set in Windows file format.

At the beginning of each SAS data set that is created by using Version 8 is a universal header. This header contains host-related information that is used, such as number size, number alignment, data representation (such as IEEE floating-point), and character set (such as ASCII). In an NFS (Network File System) environment, the accessing host uses the universal header of the file to determine how the data is represented.

If the file data representation and the accessing host data representation are the same (for example, the file is represented in Windows format and the accessing host is a Windows host), then the accessing host can read the file and write to the file.

If the file data representation and the accessing host representation are different, then the accessing host can dynamically translate the data file into the accessing host native format for read-only access. For example, an OpenVMS Alpha host can access an NFS-mounted file that is in Windows format. Using the universal header, the OpenVMS Alpha host can translate each observation that it reads into a format that it understands. The accessing host translates only the observation that it retrieves for reading.

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