The new Base SAS data provider provides access to Base SAS data sets that are available through a local installation of Base SAS. In this context, the Base SAS installation functions as a local, single-user server. Access to third-party relational data sources (with licensed SAS/ACCESS engines) is also supported. Previously, this capability was available through the SAS/SHARE provider.

The version of the Data Link Properties dialog box that is used with the IOM and OLAP providers now enables you to make the following choices:

• specify any SAS Metadata Server
• select from a list of workspace and OLAP servers that are defined in that metadata server

Previously, only the default metadata server could be used. No list of available OLAP and workspace servers was provided.

The IOM provider supports three new properties for managing SAS code before a data source is initialized.

• "SAS Workspace Init Script" (DBPROP_SAS_INIT_WORKSPACE_INIT_SCRIPT) enables you to specify SAS code to be submitted to a SAS Workspace Server immediately after a connection to the server is established.
• "SAS Workspace Init List" (DBPROP_SAS_WORKSPACE_INIT_LIST) enables you to capture the SAS listing from the SAS code submitted using the "SAS Workspace Init Script" property.
• "SAS Workspace Init Log " (DBPROP_SAS_WORKSPACE_INIT_LOG) enables you to capture the SAS log from the SAS code submitted using the "SAS Workspace Init Script" property.

The SAS/SHARE and local providers now support reading multilingual data from a data set with UTF-8 encoding.

A 64-bit version of the local provider is now available for use on Windows XP for x64 systems. You can use the 64-bit local provider to read SAS data sets from 64-bit applications. The 64-bit local provider does not support reading SAS V6 and transport data sets. You can install both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of the local provider on the same machine.