The data set Sasuser.Admit contains health information about patients in a clinic, their activity level, height, and weight. Suppose you want to create a subset of the data. Specifically, you want to create a small data set containing data about all the men in the group who are older than 50.

To create the data set, you must first reference the library in which Sasuser.Admit is stored. Then you must specify the name of the library in which you want to store the Males data set. Finally, you write a DATA step to read your data and create a new data set.

The DATA step below reads all observations and variables from the existing data set Sasuser.Admit into the new data set Males. The DATA statement creates the permanent SAS data set Males, which is stored in the SAS library Men50. The SET statement reads the permanent SAS data set Sasuser.Admit and subsets the data using a WHERE statement. The new data set, Males, contains all males in Sasuser.Admit who are older than 50.

libname sasuser "C:Users
amesasuser";
libname Men50 "C:Users
amesasuserMen50";
data Men50.males;
set sasuser.admit;
	where sex='M' and age>50;   
run;

When you submit this DATA step, the following messages appear in the log, confirming that the new data set was created:

9226  data Men50.males;
9227  set sasuser.admit;
9228  where sex='M' and age>50;
9229  run;

NOTE: There were 3 observations read from the data set SASUSER.ADMIT.
      WHERE (sex='M') and (age>50);
NOTE: The data set MEN50.MALES has 3 observations and 9 variables.
NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):
      real time           0.00 seconds
      cpu time            0.00 seconds

You can add a PROC PRINT statement to this same example to see the output of Men50.Males.

proc print data=Men50.males;
   title "Men Over 50";
run;