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