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Deciding How to Specify Selection Criteria

Use the following guidelines to determine when to use a WHERE clause in the view descriptor and when to use a SAS WHERE clause.

WHERE Clause in the View Descriptor

Include a WHERE clause in your view descriptor when you want to

• restrict users of view descriptors to certain subsets of data

• use CA-DATACOM/DB syntax and functionality, such as masking or delimiters

• prevent users from sequentially passing the entire CA-DATACOM/DB table.

SAS WHERE Clause

Use a SAS WHERE clause when the previous guidelines do not apply and you want to

• have more run-time flexibility in subsetting data

• use SAS WHERE clause capabilities that CA-DATACOM/DB does not support, such as arithmetic expressions or truncated comparisons.

Note:   Masking and delimiter characters are ignored in a SAS WHERE clause. For example,

where x='\y\a'

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