What's New in SAS 9.2 Drivers for ODBC

Overview

This document has a new title for SAS 9.2. Its title in previous releases was SAS ODBC Driver: User's Guide and Programmer's Reference.

In this release, SAS provides the following enhancements to the SAS ODBC Driver:

three new SQL options that affect the interaction between the SAS ODBC Driver, SAS, and the ODBC application
the driver prompts for user ID and password when authenticating to SAS Scalable Performance Data (SPD) Server
documentation enhancements for SAS 9.2 Drivers for ODBC: User's Guide

The SAS Table Server Driver for ODBC, which enables access to the SAS Table Server, is deprecated in the third maintenance release for SAS 9.2.

New SQL Options

SQL option Use client code page tells the driver to use the client's code page information when transcoding multi-byte characters to and from WideChar. The option Infer type in min/max functions tells the driver to attempt to determine the format of a column that is used as input to a MIN or MAX function, and to use that format to infer the SQL type of the column.

In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2, the option Quote Char is NULL is available. This option tells the driver to use an empty string for the SQL_IDENTIFIER_QUOTE_CHAR InfoType of the SQLGetInfo method.

Authentication to SPD Server

In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2, the SAS ODBC Driver has improved authentication to SPD Server. If an authentication attempt fails, the SAS ODBC Driver provides a real-time prompt for user ID and password credentials. The SAS ODBC Driver permits three authentication attempts.

Documentation Enhancements

A note has been added about support for Unicode UTF-8 encoding.
The list of systems on which SAS/ACCESS software is available has been updated.
Obsolete information about manually converting DDE servers to TCP servers has been removed because the conversion happens automatically.
Information about how the SAS ODBC Driver supports direct connections to SPD Server has been added. (Connections to SPD SNET are not supported with SAS 9 and later versions of the SAS ODBC Driver.)
If the client machine has a server form of Microsoft Windows, such as Windows Server 2003, then SAS/SHARE software must be licensed on the client machine. This license requirement applies even if you want to access local data only.
In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2, information and examples about creating DATE, TIME, and DATETIME values are added. Information and examples are in Chapter 4, “Programmer's Reference.”
In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2, obsolete information about unencrypted passwords is removed. The obsolete information described how the SAS ODBC Driver encrypts passwords in server definitions that were created by SAS ODBC Driver versions older than Release 8.1 of SAS. When the SAS 9.2 Drivers for ODBC are installed, the installation software deletes all SAS server definitions, which removes all password information. When the SAS ODBC Driver Configuration dialog box is used to add or modify data sources, passwords are stored in encrypted form.
In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2, Chapter 2, “Defining Your Data Sources,” is revised. The chapter provides procedural information for configuring connections to local data, a SAS/SHARE server, and SPD Server.

SAS Table Server Driver for ODBC

In the third maintenance release for SAS 9.2, the SAS Table Server Driver for ODBC is deprecated. As a result, information about the SAS Table Server Driver for ODBC is removed.