In this post we look at how we can use a simple piece of SQL to create a histogram which gives a quick overview of the number of variables in each domain.

The SASHELP.VCOLUMN dataset contains a list of all variables present in each dataset. Here we use the repeat function to output a “*” character for each variable in the dataset. The output of the query is printed to the active output destination.

PROC SQL;
   SELECT memname  , REPEAT('*',nvar) AS freq
   FROM sashelp.vtable
   WHERE libname = "SASHELP";
 QUIT;

The result is something similar to the below, which gives a quick insight into the number of variables in each dataset in the SASHELP library.

This SQL histogram technique has a wide varierty of other applications, for example here we use it to show the frequency of countries within each region in the SASHELP.DEMOGRAPHICS dataset.

PROC SQL;
  SELECT region , REPEAT('*',COUNT(*)) AS freq
  FROM sashelp.demographics
  GROUP BY region
  ORDER BY region;
QUIT;

The post SAS tips & tricks #4 – Visualising SAS datasets with an sql histogram appeared first on Statskom.