Transpose long to wide in SAS

Question

I have a very large data set (18 million observations) that I would like to transpose by subsetting based on one variable and creating 900 new variables out of those sub/ets. Ex

Answer 1

I'm not sure what your subsetting would be based on, but if it's only the id, it is rather straightforward.

Using the example from this ucla's page on proc sort, your example would work fine using slightly modified input data:

data long; 
  input id year faminc ; 
  datalines ; 
1 96 40000 
1 97 40500 
1 98 41000 
2 96 45000 
2 97 45400 
2 98 45800 
3 96 75000 
3 97 76000 
3 98 77000 
; 

proc sort data=long;
  by year;
run;

proc transpose data=long out=wide(drop=_name_) prefix=var; 
  by year; 
  var faminc; 
run;

Results

year var1  var2  var3 
96   40000 45000 75000 
97   40500 45400 76000 
98   41000 45800 77000 

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UCLA's SAS help pages are much clearer than SAS's own as regards to using proc transpose in both directions. Here are 4 valuable links...

Long to Wide with Proc Transpose
Wide to Long with Proc Transpose

Long to Wide with Data Step
Wide to Long with Data Step