For data sources that
can lock system resources as a result of operations such as DELETE
or RENAME, or as a result of queries on system tables or table indices,
a utility connection is used. The utility connection prevents the
COMMIT statements that are issued to unlock system resources from
being submitted on the same connection that is being used for table
processing. Keeping the COMMIT statements off of the table processing
connection alleviates the problems that they can cause, such as invalidating
cursors and committing pending updates on the tables being processed.
Since a utility connection
exists for each LIBNAME statement, the number of connections to a
data source can become large as multiple librefs are assigned across
multiple SAS sessions. Setting UTILCONN_TRANSIENT= to YES keeps these
connections from existing when they are not being used, thus reducing
the number of current connections to the data source at any point
in time.
UTILCONN_TRANSIENT=
is ignored by data sources that do not support utility connections.