Data sources 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. Use a
utility connection in these circumstances. 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. Eliminating COMMIT statements from 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 continuing to exist when they
are not being used. Therefore,the number of current connections to the data
source is reduced.
UTILCONN_TRANSIENT=
is ignored by data sources that do not support utility connections.