How to Create an Empty SAS Dataset
If you were to do this in SAS to create an empty SAS dataset:
data mytable;
run;
It would actually create a dataset with one row. The data step cycles through once, hits the end (run), outputs a row, then comes back and finds it has no more rows to process so it stops. To stop this one row from being output, try this instead:
data mytable;
stop;
run;