Develop job via SAS DI studio: What is SQL Pass Through and why you use it?

If you are an ETL Developer  and using SAS DI Studio as your ETL tool then this post can be interesting for you. SQL Pass-Through Facility is  SQL procedure that enables developer to send DBMS-specific statements to a DBMS and to retrieve data from database.
You can specify database SQL syntax instead of SAS SQL syntax when you use the Pass-Through Facility.

What is SQL Pass Through?
When we make job via SAS DI studio and use PROC SQL to make operation in database  then your SQL statement will directly communicate with database and make all the operation on your SQL database and final result will bring back to SAS. To activate the feature what you need to do is to set  your SAS DI studio property SQL Pass Through 'Yes'.

Fig 1: How to activate SQL Pass through

Why will you use SQL Pass Through?

1) It's handy when you use database specific function like QUALIFY, RANK etc.
2) If your SQL query has calculation then it will be on SQL database so it's faster
3) Very little processing time on SAS side
4) If you are using store procedure or SQL macro in your ETL job then SQL Pass Through will surely pay off.