SAS/SHARE User's Guide

The SAS Data Library Model

You should make sure you thoroughly understand the material on the SAS data library model in SAS Language Reference: Concepts before you attempt to tune SAS applications and servers at your installation. Here are some of the terms defined in that material that are most important to understanding this paper:

A SAS data library can have five types of members, DATA, VIEW, CATALOG, PROGRAM, ACCESS, MDDB, and FDB. This paper will deal only with the types DATA, VIEW, and CATALOG.

A library member of type DATA is a SAS data file. Through Version 5 of SAS, SAS Institute referred to such files as SAS data sets. A SAS data file may be compressed, and it may have zero or more indexes.

A SAS data view is a set of directions that tells a SAS view engine how to combine data from one or more sources into observations.

A SAS catalog is a file that contains smaller files; the files contained in a catalog are catalog entries. Some types of entries you might be familiar with are PROGRAM (SAS/AF programs), SCREEN (PROC FSEDIT screens), and FORMAT (user-written formats).

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