TT05
Using SAS to get more out of Oracle Clinical
Jim Johnson, Covance Periapproval Services

Oracle Clinical creates SAS data sets as part of its regular function. This paper will describe ways to get more out of Oracle Clinical than it "wants" to give you. Oracle Clinical provides several variations of the data such as Value Text, Full Value Text, DVG long value, DVG short value, DVG number, Validation status, and Exception value text. Most of these will at some point become necessary for processing, reporting, and delivering the data. Unfortunately, Oracle Clinical only allows a certain numb er of bytes for each record when generating the SAS data sets, and that width is not large enough to recover all the variations available. Only one 'active' extract is available at a time, so you need to know how to get the most out of it. Using SAS, you can use one extract to get all these data types with little cooperation from the Oracle Clinical product.