System limitations

SAS compatibility

The Real Time Remote Access (RTRA) system uses SAS version 9.4 and data requests must be submitted in the form of SAS programs in plain American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format. Statistics Canada does not provide programming assistance, or make modifications to the programs that are submitted. If a program does not run properly, a log will be returned with an explanation of why it failed.

Constraints

1. System limits
   • There are no limits to the number of programs that you can submit while you hold an active RTRA subscription. However, there is a maximum of 10 successful submissions per day
   • For each successful program submission, no more than 10 Real Time Remote Access (RTRA) procedure macro calls are permitted, resulting in a maximum of 100 tabulations that can be created per day
   • When running your SAS programs, please be advised that the maximum temporary space in SAS processing is 100 GB
   • A maximum of four or five variables can be specified in the class variable list, depending on the RTRA procedure macro being called
   • Class variables cannot contain any missing values
   • Each class variable may not have more than 500 distinct values
   • All observation counts in the SAS log returned to the user are replaced with xxxxxx.

2. SAS restrictions

Certain SAS keywords, or statements, are not allowed through RTRA. The following list is subject to review and may be modified.

• Certain occurrences of % and &
• Comments of the form %*...;
• Writing permanent datasets to RTRA system disk space

• _ERROR_
• _N_
• ABORT
• CATNAME
• DCREATE
• DM
• DOPEN
• ENDRSUBMIT
• ENDSAS
• ERROR
• EXECUTE
• FDELETE
• FILE
• FILENAME
• FIRST
• FIRSTOBS
• FOPEN
• FTP
• INFILE
• LAST
• LIBNAME
• MAPS
• MAPSGFK
• MAPSSAS
• MODULE
• MODULEC
• MODULEI
• MODULEIC
• MODULEIN
• MODULEN
• MOPEN
• OBS
• ODS
• OPTION
• OPTIONS
• PATHNAME
• PEEK
• PEEKC
• PEEKCLONG
• PEEKLONG
• POKE
• POKELONG
• PRINTTO
• PTRLONGADD
• PUT
• PUTLOG
• RSUBMIT
• SASFILE
• SASHELP
• SASUSER
• SIGNOFF
• SIGNON
• SYMGET
• SYMPUT
• SYMPUTX
• SYSTASK
• SYSTEM

Shell program: Test your code

To help you test your SAS code, a shell program and a SAS macro catalog are available for download.

Please open the shell program and follow the descriptions for the different sections of the program:

Section 1

• This section shows you how to simulate the standard libname that will be created automatically by the RTRA system
• Make sure you change the file path to point to where you have saved your test data
• Do not use a different libname - it must be RTRAData.

Section 2

• This section can be discarded for testing if you have created your own set of test data
• Survey dummy datasets are available for use in this section.

Section 3

• This section shows you how to point to the RTRA procedure macro to create your table.
• Change the name of the downloaded SAS macro catalog to "sasmacr"
• Make sure you change the file path to point to where you have saved the SAS catalog provided (sasmacr.sas7bcat).

Section 4

• This section shows you how to include your program and to run it
• Make sure you change the file path to point to where you have saved your program.