74 CAST= LIBNAME Option Chapter 9
Details
See the SAS/ACCESS documentation for your DBMS for additional, DBMS-specific
details.
See Also
To apply this option to an individual data set, see the data set option “BULKLOAD=
Data Set Option” on page 165.
CAST= LIBNAME Option
Specifies whether data conversions should be performed on the Teradata DBMS server or by SAS
Valid in:
the SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME statement
DBMS support:
Teradata
Default value:
none
Syntax
CAST=YES | NO
Syntax Description
YES
forces data conversions (casting) to be done on the Teradata DBMS server and
overrides any data overhead percentage limit.
NO
forces data conversions to be done by SAS and overrides any data overhead
percentage limit.
Details
Internally, SAS numbers and dates are floating point values. Teradata has varying
formats for numbers, including integers, floating point values, and decimal values.
Number conversion must occur when you are reading Teradata numbers that are not
floating point (Teradata FLOAT). SAS/ACCESS can use the Teradata CAST= function to
cause Teradata to perform numeric conversions. The parallelism of Teradata makes it
well suited to perform this work. This is especially true when running SAS on OS/390
(MVS) where CPU activity can be costly.
CAST= can cause more data to be transferred from Teradata to SAS, as a result of
the option forcing the Teradata type into a larger SAS type. For example, the CAST= of
a Teradata BYTEINT to SAS floating point adds seven overhead bytes to each row
transferred.
The following Teradata types are candidates for casting:
INTEGER
BYTEINT
SMALLINT
