How to treat data type memo in SAS?

[RinaGreen]

Hi!

When I connected to Datawarehose (DB2) through ODBC to Access 2002 I got a comment field with data type memo .

Now I am trying to write Proc SQL in SAS...

Which datatype I should assign in the PROC SQL SAS code? Character? An with what size?

Thank you!

Rina

 

[klaz2002]

The memo field can be huge. SAS has a limit (length) of 200 in older versions, but in V8 and above the limit of a char field is 32,000 aprox. You would set that field to a char variable. As for the size you should see how much that field usually takes up and use that as a guide. I don't think it would be wise to set the SAS var to 32000.

Klaz

 

[ChrisW75]

Memo fields suck. First question you should ask is "Do I really need this field in my output?". Look at what you are doing and see what you need, most times you don't need to extract the memo field. You'll also want to ask someone with DB2 knowledge what the maximum size is for a memo field, and maybe do a query as to what the maximum sized actual value is (could be that maximum size in the memo field is 1024, but the longest string in there is only 20).