While working on a SAS OLAP and ESRI project, I was asked about geocoding addresses. Fortunately, Jeff Phillips, one of the SAS presenters at SESUG09 gave a talk about PROC GEOCODE. In SAS 9.2, street addresses can be given x/y coordinates via the geocode procedure using the 5 or 9 digit zipcodes. This isn't exact (as it maps to the centriod of the zipcode), but its a quick way to group data by geographic region.

The procedure is very straightforward:

  proc geocode data=source out=maptable zip nocity attributevar(city);
    run;

Check out the paper by Shane Trahan and his RTI teammates given at SESUG09 this week that discusses using the Google API for a more exact level of mapping coordinates. It should be available soon on a website near you. (RV-007 Title: Integrating Geocode Data from the Google Map API and SAS/Graph®)

Reference:

1. SAS Online Documentation http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/graphref/61884/HTML/default/a003121441.htm
2. SAS Graph Paper from SAS Presents http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/sgf09/230-2009.pdf