CEDA offers these advantages:
You can transparently process a supported SAS file with no knowledge of the file's data representation or character encoding.
System performance is maximized, because a read operation requires a single translation between native and foreign representations, rather than a translation from native representation to transport file to native representation.
No interim transport files are created.
CEDA eliminates the need to perform explicit steps in order to process the file.
The internal numeric representation that is provided by CEDA is more precise than that provided by the XPORT engine with PROC COPY. CEDA uses a one-step translation from the native representation of the source environment to the native representation of the target environment, whereas the XPORT engine uses a two-step transformation from a file's native representation to the target environment by means of a transport format.