Data Management Solutions Using SAS Hash Table Operations

Book excerpt: Hash tables can do a lot more than you might think! Data Management Solutions Using SAS Hash Table Operations: A Business Intelligence Case Study concentrates on solving your challenging data management and analysis problems via the power of the SAS hash object, whose environment and tools make it possible to create complete dynamic solutions. To this end, this book provides an in-depth overview of the hash table as an in-memory database with the CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) cycle rendered by the hash object tools. By using this concept and focusing on real-world problems exemplified by sports data sets and statistics, this book seeks to help you take advantage of the hash object productively, in particular, but not limited to, the following tasks: select proper hash tools to perform hash table operations use proper hash table operations to support specific data management tasks use the dynamic, run-time nature of hash object programming understand the algorithmic principles behind hash table data look-up, retrieval, and aggregation learn how to perform data aggregation, for which the hash object is exceptionally well suited manage the hash table memory footprint, especially when processing big data use hash object techniques for other data processing tasks, such as filtering, combining, splitting, sorting, and unduplicating. Using this book, you will be able to answer your toughest questions quickly and in the most efficient way possible!