Marc Schwartz wrote: > Perhaps the most notable format that is lacking is the SAS proprietary > format (not the Transport format), which is not openly published and to > my knowledge, has not been independently reverse engineered.
The SAS proprietary dataset and format catalogue structures were successfully reverse engineered by a small software firm called Conceptual and were made available in a product called DBMS/Copy. DBMS/Copy is/was similar to StatTransfer, but by 2002 was going a lot further by adding support for much of the SAS data step syntax and some core SAS procedures as well - in other words, it was rapidly becoming a very viable and quite good pop person's SAS (with a modest one-off license fee). However, the SAS Institute bought out the privately-held Conceptual company, and now sells DBMS/Copy thhrough its wholly-owned daat integration offshoot company, DataFlux, but without the SAS datastep support features (to avoid competition with the mainstream SAS cash cows) - see http://www.conceptual.com/ > Any of the commercial products that support that format, with the > possible exception of the SAS System Viewer (which is not open source, > but is free from SAS), will be closed source and will have to be > purchased. DBMS/Copy is definitely closed-source and is probably not nearly as cheapl as it once was when sold by Conceptual. But it is a great product for convert to or from SAS proprietary data sets and format catalogues, and works well and quickly with even huge datasets. Tim C ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
