What the best way to work around this? I have the same SELECT statement but there are different criteria depending on the IF check. Well, if you happen to be using Sql Server you can do that sort of ...

The DESCRIBE TABLE statement writes a CREATE TABLE statement to the SAS log for the table specified in the DESCRIBE TABLE statement, regardless of how the table was originally created (for example, ...

The DICTIONARY tables component is specified in the FROM clause of a SELECT statement. DICTIONARY is a reserved libref for use only in PROC SQL. Data from DICTIONARY tables are generated at run time.