Date:         Thu, 5 Jul 2007 09:11:20 -0700
Reply-To:     Alon <akadas@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Alon <akadas@GMAIL.COM>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Subject:      Re: Help! Accessing observations from a dataset using a lookup
Comments: To: sas-l@uga.edu
In-Reply-To:  <070120072059.19488.468815B50004B6B500004C20220642441305029A06CE9907@comcast.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

All,

First I'd like to say thanks to all of you for the input.

Just to confirm for all of you, your gasps are were not in vain, I did
not mistakenly change an 'm' to a 'b' or read an additional 3 zeroes.
Yes, these are on tapes as well.

The key to this problem is that Master is the large dataset which I
cannot modify (there goes the index idea out the window) but Lookup is
the smaller dataset. It may have 100 id's or 100,000 id's, but to say
the least it is much much smaller. Though copying the dataset over
again and then dealing with it works, This amount of redundancy
assosciated with it is too large for me to leave this unnoticed
(though unfortunately that is what myself and everyone else in my
company resorts to).

Even though the format method seems to be nice I am not sure how I
would define the format. I also thought of a different approach that
would store the id's in a macro variable and then do a 'where in
(&id)' - but then realized that cannot be scaled for larger amount of
Id's (or can it?).

One thing that came to mind is putting Id's into several macro
variables in chunks of say 1000 (I am not sure if one macro variable
can fit that many, but for arguments sake lets say it can) &ID1
&ID2.... &&ID&N (&N is the # of macros needed - say N=6 if you have
5,453 Id's).
So one solution would be to just have a do loop with checks on the
Id's (now I'm just strechting out the code's capability, I've never
done this before and have never seen it done before so I hope
something like this is possible - if any of you have suggestions then
please comment).

do i = 1 to &N;
 if (id in (&&ID&I..)) then output;
end;

**I realize the above has an issue since it is not in a %do loop but a
regular data step do loop

The nice thing about this is that you can do some stuff like add flags
(ie &&FLAG&I ) which will serve as a counter and when &&flag&i = 1000
you short out the statement '(id in (&&ID&I..))'.

I will also test out the Hash objects method (its good to learn how to
do this eventually).

Again, thanks everyone for the support.

-Alon