What's New in SAS Drivers for ODBC 9.3

SAS provides a 64-bit version of the driver so that 64-bit ODBC-compliant applications can use the driver in native mode. The 32-bit and 64-bit drivers are installed at the same time for Windows x64 operating environments.

The SAS 9.3 Drivers for ODBC are available for download from http://support.sas.com/demosdownloads/setupcat.jsp?cat=ODBC+Drivers.

The 64-bit driver does not support connections to the SAS Scalable Performance Data (SPD) Server.

In SAS 9.2 and the initial release of SAS 9.3, the SAS Drivers for ODBC supported using either the SAS/SHARE server password or the Userid/Password Override feature. In this release, the SAS Drivers for ODBC support using both features at the same time.

In previous releases of the SAS Drivers for ODBC, it was necessary to edit the TCP/IP services file for the client machine with a service name. The service name was used to define the server name, and the driver used the service name to look up the TCP/IP port number to use for communication with the SAS server. In the SAS 9.3 release, a simplified syntax of two underscores and the port number are used for both local and SAS/SHARE server access. This enhancement avoids the need to edit the TCP/IP services file. However, the legacy behavior remains in the driver for sites that already have server names defined in the TCP/IP services file.

In previous releases of the SAS Drivers for ODBC, when a connection was made to an SPD Server, the driver searched for the spds.dll library file in a shared files location. With this release of the SAS Drivers for ODBC, the driver searches for the spds.dll file in the driver installation directory. For more information, see Setting Up a Connection to SPD Server.

The Disable _0 Override Parsing option was not enabled in previous version of the SAS Drivers for ODBC and caused the driver to strip off a trailing _0 from variable names when the variable name is longer than eight bytes. Enabling this option can be helpful when accessing SAS Version 6 servers or version 6 data sets, but often causes errors with newer SAS versions. In this release, the option is enabled by default to avoid parsing errors with SAS servers at version 7 and newer.

The DQUOTE=ANSI SQL option appears on the General tab of the SAS ODBC Driver Configuration dialog box. When this option is enabled, values that are enclosed in double quotation marks are treated as variables by the SAS server that runs the query, rather than as a string. This option enables you to use DBMS names and other names that are not normally permissible in SAS as table names, column names, and aliases.