Overview of Common Data Sources

Local and Remote Access to Data

To access data you must register the data as a library in SAS Management Console. The procedures for accessing data and registering data are explained later in this document. However, one of the important details for file-based data, such as SAS data sets, is that you need to specify the file system path to the data. This path is needed so a SAS Application Server can access it. As shown in the following figure, SAS data sets that are local to the SAS Application Server have a fully qualified path such as C:\data\sourcetables:

SAS Workspace Server Accessing Local Data Sets

[SAS Workspace Server Accessing Local Data Sets]

Often, file-based data is stored on a host that is remote from the SAS Application Server. When the hosts have a network path for shared directories such as a Windows UNC path or UNIX NFS, then that path is used. The following figure shows an example of a SAS Workspace Server accessing a UNC path, \\dataserver\sourcetables, on a data server.

SAS Workspace Server Accessing Remote Data Sets

[SAS Workspace Server Accessing Remote Data Sets]

Note: This figure shows a SAS Workspace Server accessing data over a shared file system. To access data over network connection (without the file system), use SAS/SHARE as described in this document. [cautionend]

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