sas load into Teradata Date format

Question

I am having an issue when loading SAS dates into Teradata. The date format in SAS was '01Jan2017'D, and after loading the dates in the teradata would show a string of number like 23050, but not in a date format. And I used put function before loading to change the format in SAS and also after loading I used cast date format function in Teradata, but neither of them worked.

Does anybody have the solution for this?

Thanks a lot for answering!

Answer 1

Are you using SAS/Access to Teradata? If so it should automatically define the variable as a date in Teradata. Let's make a little table in SAS. Note that attaching a valid SAS date format is critical for SAS to understand that your variable has date values.

data have ;
  mydate = '01JAN2017'd;
  format mydate date9. ;
run;

Now let's upload it to a new teradata table.

libname td teradata ..... ;
data td.mytable ;
  set have;
run;

Now let's read it back and see what is in it.

proc print data=td.mytable;
run;

Now if you have already loaded a lot of data into Teradata and the values look like the integer number of days since 1/1/1960, which is how SAS stores dates internally, then it is an easy calculation in Teradata to convert that to a date. Just add it back to date '1960-01-01'. Try running this query on your TD server.

select DATE '2017-01-01' date1, date '1960-01-01' + 20820 date2 

Both DATE1 and DATE2 should be the same.