Base SAS vs. SAS Data Integration Studio: Understanding ETL and the SAS Tools Used to Support it

Every data warehouse, data mart and data hut needs it. Every good business intelligence interface depends on it. It has been the hallmark of what SAS programmers have done for over 30 years –beat data into submission (a.k.a. ETL- extract, transform and load data). Now all grown up and ready to take on the world, SAS ® software’s ability to get at just about any data source, massage, cajole, beat, cleanse and transform information and then make it sing and dance in your tool of preference makes SAS the ideal choice for modern decision-support applications. So which tools, technologies and/or approaches can we use for ETL and which make sense for any given application? We will explore the world of ETL from the perspective of the tasks that we have to accomplish and compare using Base SAS tools versus Data Integration Studio (or as it is now known – SAS Data Integration Studio). To that end, we will highlight what a good ETL system should be able to do by taking a lesson from Ralph Kimball and his book and articles that outline the 38 subsystems for ETL. We will touch on several key tasks found in ETL and show you how to accomplish these using both Base SAS and SAS Data Integration Studio. In addition, we will summarize the major capabilities of each approach as a quick reference for management