Analyze SAS Data Sets Data in R via ODBC

Access SAS Data Sets data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for SAS Data Sets and the RODBC package to work with remote SAS Data Sets data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to SAS Data Sets data and visualize SAS Data Sets data in R.

Install R

You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).

Connect to SAS Data Sets as an ODBC Data Source

Information for connecting to SAS Data Sets follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.

Set the following connection properties to connect to your SAS DataSet files:

Connecting to Local Files

• Set the Connection Type to "Local." Local files support SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE commands.
• Set the URI to a folder containing SAS files, e.g. C:\PATH\TO\FOLDER\.

Connecting to Cloud-Hosted SAS DataSet Files

While the driver is capable of pulling data from SAS DataSet files hosted on a variety of cloud data stores, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE are not supported outside of local files in this driver.

Set the Connection Type to the service hosting your SAS DataSet files. A unique prefix at the beginning of the URI connection property is used to identify the cloud data store and the remainder of the path is a relative path to the desired folder (one table per file) or single file (a single table). For more information, refer to the Getting Started section of the Help documentation.

When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.

Windows

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Linux

If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for SAS Data Sets in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.

/etc/odbc.ini

[CData SASDataSets Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for SAS Data Sets
Description = My Description
URI = C:/myfolder

For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).

Load the RODBC Package

To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.

After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:

library(RODBC)

Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.

library(checkpoint)
checkpoint("2016-01-01")

Connect to SAS Data Sets Data as an ODBC Data Source

You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:

conn <- odbcConnect("CData SASDataSets Source")

Schema Discovery

The driver models SAS Data Sets APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:

sqlTables(conn)

Execute SQL Queries

Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the SAS Data Sets API.

restaurants <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT name, borough FROM restaurants WHERE cuisine = 'American'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)

You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:

View(restaurants)

Plot SAS Data Sets Data

You can now analyze SAS Data Sets data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:

par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2))
barplot(restaurants$borough, main="SAS Data Sets restaurants", names.arg = restaurants$name, horiz=TRUE)

👁 A basic bar plot. (Salesforce is shown.)