Assuming you have SAS/CONNECT for ORACLE (and that's a big if) - once you've "connected" to the database, SAS "sees" the tables as sas datasets, so in theory, any operation you can perform on a sas dataset you can perform on an Oracle table. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from creating a "work" data set from an Oracle table and doing whatever you wish to it without hurting anything. What you can do to the oracle tables is restricted to the permissions of the userid you are using to access the data - I am careful to use a "read-only" userid for exactly that reason. Hope this helps.