Documentation-Driven Techniques for Building SAS Data Warehouses

Overview

This paper describes a process that is used in a SAS data warehouse implementation. Data model documentation of a SAS data warehouse (in Microsoft Word or Excel) serves as a feed to a SAS program that performs Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). Coding techniques are presented for applying SAS formats, informats, and labels to SAS data warehouse tables. It proved to be extremely efficient during development, when data models often undergo changes and modifications. This suggested approach significantly speeds up the implementation of data warehouses.