117-2010: The Power of User-Defined SAS® Code in SAS® Data Integration Studio

Extensive use of standard SAS® Data Integration Studio Transformations is often made when designing data warehouses, thereby reducing maintenance requirements and the need for user defined code. This paper instead advocates using the SAS Data Integration Studio API against user defined code. Thus using the full power of SAS to build and maintain warehouse processes may yield several advantages, however an effort is required to design modules. EnterCard uses a layer of user developed, object oriented code in a framework for development and run time batches. SAS macros are designed to maximise reusability and be called from Data Integration Studio, heavy clients or SAS® Enterprise Guide®. The SAS Data Integration Studio layer is “thin” with less metadata, allowing for maintenance of separate modules, with version control of code by third party tools. The framework services are discussed and SAS Data Integration Studio examples shown. The framework runs in multiple warehouses serving our Swedish, Norwegian and Danish offices. Our approach has afforded flexible and effective development (even by junior developers), secure execution and homogeneous processes.