This is all possible because the TKFORMAT subsystem is installed inside the DBMS. In fact, TKFORMAT supports more than just SAS formats that are defined using PROC FORMAT. SAS ships with hundreds of formats already defined. Formats supplied by SAS are deployed into the DBMS as a small set of runtime modules. Formats created by PROC FORMAT, in contrast, can export these user-written format definitions as XML. These XML streams can then be stored inside the DBMS as database objects. The TKFORMAT components know how to identify a user-written format and find its XML definition inside the DBMS. The details.
