In
Overview of Connecting to Common Data Sources, you learned how to register libraries in metadata and assigned
the libraries to SAS servers. These libraries represent data such
as SAS data sets in a directory or the tables in a database schema.
By assigning a library to a SAS server, you accomplish the following:
-
enable the SAS server to access
the library
-
make the library visible to users
of the SAS server
-
control which SAS engine is used
by the SAS server to access data, if you pre-assign the library
Assigning a library
to a SAS server means letting the SAS server session know that a libref—a
shortcut name—is associated with the information that a SAS
session needs to access a data library. SAS Intelligence Platform
clients such as SAS Data Integration Studio, SAS OLAP Cube Studio,
and SAS Information Map Studio generate SAS code that uses librefs.
Before the generated code can access data from a library, the library
must be assigned to the SAS server that executes the code. After the
SAS server determines that a library is assigned to it, the next step
is to determine how the SAS server should access the data in the library.
There are two ways in which a server can determine how to access
data in a library. One way is for you, as the administrator, to configure
the environment so that the SAS server finds out about the libref
and the SAS engine to use for data access at server start-up. This
approach is referred to as pre-assigning the library, because the
libref is established before any code that uses that libref is submitted.
The other way is to let the client application define the libref and
set the SAS engine when it generates code for submission to that server.