import data into eViews from SAS

[mceldocj]

Hello - I received this request from a professor at our college. Our labs have eViews 6 installed, but he is the only one requesting this type of support, so I'm hoping I can get some guidance. Thanks in advance. -Cara

"I’m trying to import data into eViews from SAS. It recognizes the file type and is supposedly able to do this. However, I get the following error message: ‘SAS Universal ODBC Driver’ is not installed. Can we find the driver? I have SAS v9. The file is v7. I think most of the data sets I’ve gotten recently are v7."

[EViews Chris]

Probably the best thing to do is to export the SAS dataset from SAS in SAS 'XPORT' format (see SAS documentation for details). XPORT format is a publicly documented format which EVIews can read without any extra drivers required.

The downside of XPORT format is that it is an older SAS format, so there may be some problems with truncation of variable names.

All other SAS formats are not publicly documented, so EViews can only read them by using software from SAS. A few years ago SAS had a product called the 'SAS Universal ODBC driver' which could be purchased for a fairly minimal fee from SAS and would allow external applications to read many formats of SAS datasets. We added to EVIews the ability to use this driver to read SAS datasets. Unfortunately, SAS seems to have discontinued this product so I don't know of any way to obtain it at present.

The Enterprise Edition of EViews has general support for ODBC drivers and may be able to use the generic SAS ODBC driver that comes as part of the SAS software to read SAS datasets.

There are a few companies who have reversed engineered the undocumented SAS formats and can translate SAS datasets into something that EViews will read easily (such as an SPSS portable dataset). StatTransfer is one product that can do this. There was also a product called DBMS/Copy but I believe that this is now owned by SAS itself, and I'm not sure what the current status of the standalone product is.

To sum up, the bad news is that you will probably have to go through some intermediate format rather than being able to read the SAS datasets directly into EViews.

We would certainly like to improve on this situation in the future, but the fact that no documentation is available for the SAS file formats makes it very difficult for us to add direct support for them.

[EViews Chris]

Just wanted to revise my comments above to note that version 7 of EViews now supports using the SAS OLE DB driver to read directly from at least some formats of SAS binary files.

A read only version of the SAS OLE DB driver is available for download from the SAS website at no charge.

If you install this on your system, EViews should gain the ability to read SAS files with the extension .sd2 and .sas7bdat. (For example, by using the menu command File.. Open... Foreign Data as Workfile...)

[dagfinnrime]

Hi,

Eviews 8 and 9 read the ordinary sas7bdat-files. However, it doesn't translate eg. SAS-date to Eviews date (number-format is different). Using the SAS ODBC link does this, hence is very useful.

(Of course, since SAS-time is seconds since midnight, and Eviews-time is share of day (I think/hope), one can convert, but ...)

Hence: I would very much like to have the SAS ODBC link to work. I have installed SAS 9.4 64b and Eviews 8.1 Enterprise Ed.

Questions:
1) I can not access SAS via ODBC with Eviews 32b when the ODBC driver is 64b? Right?

If I try, I get the following message:

WQE Tracefile 'WQE08932.TRC' open failed rc 5

Trace-file is something SAS creates in the process, otherwise a web-search didn't tell me too much.

2) I believe I have set up the SAS ODBC driver correctly (I have used this on a earlier PC). Are there any known bugs/problems with this?

I get the following error-message:

Error: "ODBC Error unable to connect to driver"

Thanks in advance,

Dagfinn

[EViews Steve]

1) Yes, ODBC drivers are bit-dependent. You cannot use a 32-bit ODBC driver from a 64-bit program and vice-versa.

2) I'm not aware of any known SAS ODBC issues. That error seems like you're running into a 32-bit/64-bit issue you asked about in question 1. I would try installing both versions of EViews onto your system and try accessing ODBC from both.

Steve