Chang,

You're correct in that a number of companies have done it. I believe SPSS
can do it, WPS, Stat Transfer, dbmscopy, and perhaps others have also done
it. But what I think is unique about this is that Alan is talking about
offering plug-ins so you can roll-your-own so to speak. How cool would it be
to have some type of driver/plugin for R?

Phil

Philip Rack
MineQuest, LLC
SAS & WPS Consulting and WPS Reseller
Tel: (614) 457-3714
Web: www.MineQuest.com
Blog: www.MineQuest.com/WordPress



-----Original Message-----
From: Chang Chung [mailto:chang_y_chung@HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2009 2:50 PM
To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU; Phil Rack
Subject: Re: Reading & Writing SAS data sets without SAS

On Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:03:58 -0400, Philip Rack <PhilRack@MINEQUEST.COM>
wrote:
....
>I was out on Alan Churchill's blog and noticed that he's able to read AND
>write SAS data sets now without using SAS. Rather interesting...
>
>http://savian.blogspot.com/
....
Hi,
It must be incredibly difficult, but this has been done -- Stat/Transfer has
been able to read and write SAS datasets.
I hope SI makes .sas7bdat and related proprietary binary file formats open
and
documented. It's been a while they replaced the version 6 binary files
(.sd2,
and so forth), and should be stable by now.
It ultimately pays to play nice with others, I believe. :-)
Cheers,
Chang