Compilation Phase and Execution Phase
Data step processing consists of two phases:
During the compilation phase, SAS simply checks the code for syntax error and creates the parts that are necessary to create the data set.
No data is read or written in this phase.
The execution phase, on the other hand, is the phase where the data set is created.
The flowchart below shows the steps of the two processing phases:
Does the process seem confusing?
No worries. Each step in the data step processing will be explained in detail in this lesson.
