What's the easiest way to use SQLite with SAS? - sqlite

Question

I want to investigate how to access SQLite DB from SAS. What's the easiest way of doing this? Is there a SAS product that we can license to do that? I don't want to use ODBC drivers as that seems to have been written a long time ago and is not officially part of SQLite.

Answer 1

SAS supports reading data from pipes (in a unix environment). Essentially, you can set up a filename statement to execute an sqlite command in the host environment, then process the command output as if reading it from a text file.
SAS Support page: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/hostunx/61879/HTML/default/viewer.htm#pipe.htm
Example:
*----------------------------------------------
* (1) Write a command in place of the file path
* --> important: the 'pipe' option makes this work
*----------------------------------------------;
filename QUERY pipe 'sqlite3 database_file "select * from table_name"';
*----------------------------------------------
* (2) Use a datastep to read the output from sqlite
*----------------------------------------------;
options linesize=max; *to prevent truncation of results;
data table_name;
infile QUERY delimiter='|' missover dsd lrecl=32767;
length
numeric_id 8
numeric_field 8
character_field_1 $40
character_field_2 $20
wide_character_field $500
;
input
numeric_id
numeric_field $
character_field_1 $
character_field_2 $
wide_character_field $
;
run;
*----------------------------------------------
* (3) View the results, process data etc.
*----------------------------------------------;
proc contents;
proc means;
proc print;
run;