Shared Access to SAS Data Sets

SAS/SHARE software provides concurrent Update access to SAS files for multiple users. SAS/SHARE is often required for transaction-oriented applications where multiple users need to update the same SAS data sets at the same time. Data entry applications where multiple users are entering data to the same data set are a good example of this type of usage. SAS/SHARE software provides both member-level locking and record-level locking. Therefore, two or more users can update different observations within the same data set, and other users can print reports from the same data set.

SAS/SHARE supports multi-user Read and Write access to both SAS data files and SAS catalogs. Multi-user access to SAS catalogs simplifies the maintenance of applications by allowing users and developers to share the same program libraries. Users can execute applications at the same time that developers update the source programs.

SAS/SHARE software also acts as a data server that delivers data to users for their processing needs. This capability provides data administrators both a centralized point of control for their data and a secure environment to control who accesses the data. SAS/SHARE is also designed to be a reliable data server that functions as long as the system that the server is running on is operational.

Finally, SAS/SHARE enables you use SAS software to define views of your data. This allows administrators to restrict certain users to subsets of data for security or efficiency purposes. Access to rows and columns in SAS tables can be defined using this technique. The following figure shows shared access to SAS data sets. Note that the data server in the figure can be a different operating system and architecture from the SAS Application Server, if the site is licensed for that configuration.

For a detailed example of a shared SAS data set connection, see Establishing Shared Access to SAS Data Sets.