Presenters: Laurie Flemng
SAS provides us with many very useful transformations within DIS. But unsurprisingly it’s not complete: some are lacking functionality (Summary is there solely as a reporting node, and thus only provides printed output, not a dataset), some don’t exist (how do you take the first or last entry for a by group? how do you create a Type 6 Slowly Changing Dimension?) and some that do work are not efficient or incomplete (Type 2 generator).
Fortunately SAS has also provided us with the skeleton to create new transformations. It is possible to create a whole DIS process by putting all the code within a user-written transformation, but this is a bad thing and should be avoided except in the most unusual circumstances. However by fitting in with the conceptual structure of how DIS processes work, and generalising code so that nothing is hard-coded, putting new transformations into your processes can speed up development, reduce testing time and help ensure the reliability of your jobs.
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