XPORT Engine Advantages

Using the XPORT engine (with either the DATA step or the COPY procedure) provides the following advantages:

• the ability to move files between operating environments, regardless of whether you are moving the transport file to a later or an earlier SAS release.

  Note  

  Regressing a data set (moving from a later release to an earlier release) eliminates the features that are specific to the later release. For example, when moving from SAS 9 to SAS 6, the long variable names in SAS 9 are truncated to 8 bytes. For details about file regression, see "Regressing SAS Data Sets to SAS 6 Format" on page 26.

• You can use the XPORT engine when sending a transport file to a destination operating environment when the SAS release is unknown.

• you can create the transport file one time and direct it to multiple target operating environments that run different SAS releases.

The primary reason for using the XPORT engine with the DATA step is to dynamically create one or more data sets, to order them, and then to translate them to transport format. By contrast, PROC COPY allows you to translate multiple data sets that already exist in a library.