Basic interview questions on Base SAS and Advance SAS

falguni.mathther on Mon May 21, 2012 11:11 am

Interview questions 1. What version of SAS are you currently using? 2. What does the difference between combining 2 datasets using multiple SET statement and MERGE statement? 3. Describe your familiarity with SAS Formats / Informats. 4. Can you state some special input delimiters? 5. It is possible to use the MERGE statement without a BY statement? Explain? 6. What is the purpose of trailing @ and @@ ? 7. For what purposes do you use DATA _NULL_? 8. Identify statements whose placement in the DATA step is critical. 9. What is a method for assigning first.VAR and last.VAR to the BY group variable on unsorted data? 10. How would you delete duplicate observations? 11. What is the Program Data Vector (PDV)? What are its functions? 12. What are SAS/ACCESS and SAS/CONNECT? 13. How would you determine the number of missing or nonmissing values in computations? 14. What is the difference between %LOCAL and %GLOBAL? 15. What is auto call macro and how to create a auto call macro? What is the use of it? 16. If you use a SYMPUT in a DATA step, when and where can you use the macro variable? 17. Name atleast five compile time statements? 18. SCAN vs. SUBSTR function? 19. Describe the ways in which you can create macro variables? 20. State some differences between the DATA Step and SQL? 21. What system options are you familiar with? 22. What is the COALESCE function? 23. Give some differences between PROC MEANS and PROC SUMMARY? 24. Have you used Call symputx ? What points need to be kept in mind when using it? 25. What option in PROC FORMAT allows you to create a format from an input control data set rather than VALUE statement? 26. How would you code a macro statement to produce information on the SAS log? 27. Name four set operators? 28. What does %put do? 29. Which gets applied first when using the keep= and rename= data set options on the same data set?

30. Give example of macro quoting functions? 31. What system option determines whether the macro facility searches a specific catalog for a stored, compiled macro? 32. Do you know about the SAS autoexec file? What is its significance? 33. What exactly is a sas hash table? 34. What is PROC FREQs default behavior for handling missing values? 35. I am trying to find the ways to find outliers in data. Which procedures will help me find it? 36. Have you used ODS Statements? What are benefits of ODS? 37. I want to make a quick backup of a data sets along with any associated indexes What procedure can I use? 38. What is a sas catalog? 39. What does the statement format _all_; do? 40. State different ways of combining sas datasets? 41. State different ways of getting data into SAS? 42. What is The SQL Procedure Pass-Through Facility? 43. How can you Identify and resolve programming logic errors? 44. Can a FORMAT, LABEL, DROP, KEEP, or LENGTH statements use array references? 45. What is sas PICTURE FORMATS?