A00-215 Exam Dumps : SAS Certified Associate: Programming Fundamentals Using SAS 9.4

In the provided DATA step, the merge statement is used to combine the PATIENT and VISIT data sets by the variable Id. The number of observations in the resulting ALLVISITS data set will equal the number of unique Id values that appear in both the PATIENT and VISIT data sets, because the merge in SAS is a one-to-one merge by default when the by statement is used without additional options like in=.

Looking at the provided data sets, each Id in the PATIENT data set has corresponding entries in the VISIT data set. Since there are 5 unique Id values and the VISIT data set contains multiple observations for some Id values (specifically, Id 2 and 5 have more than one visit), the ALLVISITS data set will have a total of 7 observations (1 for each patient plus the additional visits for Id 2 and 5).

References:

• SAS documentation on the merge statement.

In SAS, the PROC SORT procedure is used to sort data. To save the sorted data into a new dataset, the OUT= option is used in the PROC SORT statement. This option allows you to specify the name of the output dataset that will contain the sorted data.

Here is how it's used:

• proc sort data=original out=sorted; by variable; run; will sort the dataset original by variable and create a new dataset named sorted containing the sorted data.

Option A, Data=, is not valid for the PROC SORT procedure. Option B, SORTOUT=, is a common misconception but is not correct; OUT= is the right option. Option C, OUTPUT=, is not used within PROC SORT; it is used in other procedures such as PROC TABULATE and PROC SUMMARY for output datasets.

References:

• SAS 9.4 documentation for the PROC SORT statement: SAS Help Center: PROC SORT

The correct answer is A. The SET statement in SAS is used within a DATA step to specify which existing SAS dataset is to be read. This statement is used to read in data from an existing SAS dataset to be processed in the current DATA step. The SET statement does not specify an output data set; that is determined by the name specified in the DATA statement.

Options B, C, and D are incorrect because:

• B and C are incorrect as the SET statement is not used in the PROC SORT step at all.
• D is incorrect because the SET statement specifies the input dataset, not the output dataset, in the DATA step.

References:

• SAS 9.4 Language Reference: Concepts, "DATA Step Processing"
• SAS documentation on the SET statement.