Date:         Wed, 25 Jul 2001 18:41:12 -0400
Reply-To:     Jonathan Siegel <Jonathan.Siegel@PFIZER.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Jonathan Siegel <Jonathan.Siegel@PFIZER.COM>
Subject:      Vars Created by Oracle Clinical Stored Procs in SAS V8+

We use SAS in connection with Oracle Clinical V4.

We've noticed that when the SAS views that Oracle Clinical automatically
generates are used with SAS Version 8+, any character variable that was
created by an Oracle Stored Proc gets a length of 4000, which (for obvious
reasons) can have some very negative consequences down the line.

Is there any way that we can systematically reduce the lengths of those
variables, either to their known actual length or to some cutoff? No
variable need be longer than 256.

I understand we could create individual SAS programs to modify and update
each view, but we would have to create many thousands of them. I am hoping
for a solution that would solve the problem in an automated way. The ideal
solution would handle the situation in Oracle Clinical without our having
to go into their source code (Oracle Clinical automatically generates the
SAS code to generate the views). Your ideas for doing it in SAS would also
be very helpful.

Thanks,

Jonathan Siegel
Pfizer Clinical Research and Development
Ann Arbor Laboratories
Jonathan.Siegel@pfizer.com
734.622.3982