SAS is designed for operations like what you have mentioned! You definitely can do most of these processing in an RDBMS, but the analytical capabilities of a typical RDBMS are limited compared to SAS functions. There are some elegant structures also in SAS, for example an SQL alternative of SAS First and Last processing is more cumbersome. The codes can be organized and scheduled as flows easily in a weekly basis.
The main question is that why you would like to use an RDBMS, what advantage of it would you benefit of? Two potential advantages came into my mind:
- Multiuser usage: RDBMS's built-in locking and transactions management allow multiple database users to access a database simultaneously. I think this is not the case in your situation.
- Loads of records: In case of billions of records, SAS data sets can have a size that can become difficult to handle even with COMPRESS option switched on (speed can be an issue also). In such cases, it can be a good practice to store data in RDBMS and access it through SAS/Access interface. I think this is not the case in your situation either.
If you go with an RDBMS from SAS solution, notice that you might have to rewrite some parts of your code, as some SAS functions does not work with RDBMS-s if you run them with the libname method. The use of FedSQL (SAS implementation of ANSI SQL:1999 core standard introduced in SAS 9.4) is solving this problem.
Also note that in some special cases, you can have different results using SAS to using an RDBMS.