Things Dr Johnson Did Not Tell Me: An Introduction to SAS® Dictionary Tables

SAS maintains a wealth of information about the active SAS session, including information on libraries, tables, files and system options; this information is contained in the Dictionary Tables. Understanding and using these tables will help you build interactive and dynamic applications. Unfortunately, Dictionary Tables are often considered an ‘Advanced’ topic to SAS programmers. This paper will help novice and intermediate SAS programmers get started with their mastery of the Dictionary tables. Ever needed a list of the tables (datasets) in a library? How about the columns (variables) in a table? Need to make sure you reset any titles after you run a report? Got some pesky warning messages in your SAS log you would like to clean up? Sure, you can look them up in the table and column properties in the explorer window. Or you can run a Proc Contents and check the listing. And of course you can ignore the warnings and errors in the SAS log since they ‘almost always appear’. Or you can go to the Dictionary Tables and have your programme find out what libraries are allocated or what columns are available. So, what are Dictionary Tables and where do we access them? Before we proceed, let’s come to some common ground with terminology. In this paper we will talk about tables; for SAS programmers a table is the same as a dataset. Where a dataset has observations a table has rows. Where a dataset has variables a table has columns. You ask “Why do we use this terminology?”. And we try to answer “Because Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) use this terminology, and they have always had their own Dictionary Tables. The SAS Dictionary Tables are documented in Proc SQL, so we assume this is why SAS uses the SQL/RDBMS terminology.”