Using the General Tab

When you first access the SAS ODBC Driver Configuration dialog box, the General page is in the foreground. Use the General page for the following reasons:
  • provide the Data Source Name that you use in your ODBC application
  • provide a description of the data in the data source
  • select a server from the Server field to associate the Data Source Name with a server
  • configure the number of records to buffer
  • set SQL options
Data Source Name
provide a name for the data source that you want to access. The name must begin with a letter, and it cannot contain commas, semicolons, or any of the following special characters: [ ] { } ( ) ? * = ! @. For example, if you are defining SAS data that is stored on a machine named CICERO, you might call your data source SAS_CICERO. If you or other users are concerned only with the type of data (or with the type of application that uses that data), and not with where the data is stored, then you might have data sources with names like Finance or Payroll.
Description
provide a description of the data source. Providing a description is optional.
Server
a menu from which you can select a defined server. The first time you set up a data source, the menu is empty. Define one or more servers, and then come back to the General page to make a selection. You must specify a server for every data source.
Records to Buffer
provide the number of rows to request from the SAS/SHARE server in a single transmission. The default value is 100 and the maximum value is 32,000.
The size of the server's transmission buffer limits the actual number of rows returned. Usually you do not change the default value. However, specifying a larger value might improve performance when you retrieve a very large result set.