Introduction

SPD Server 5.1 uses architectures that enable features like the ability to support data tables that contain more than 2 G of observations. The new architectures provide functionality that today's data marts need, but the current generation of SPD Server tables use metadata architectures that are not backward compatible with SPD Server 3.x software.
SPD Server 4.x tables use architectures that use SAS 9.4 metadata. SPD Server 3.x tables use architectures that use SAS 8 metadata. These two metadata architectures are not compatible. However, SPD Server 5.1 provides a conversion utility SPDSCONV that SPD Server 3.x customers can use to convert existing tables into SPD Server 4.x format, which SPD Server 5.1 can read and open. If SPD Server 5.1 modifies an SPD Server 4.x table, the table will be saved in SPD Server 5.1 format. The SPDSCONV utility is designed to be run by the SPD Server Administrator.
To summarize:
  • SPD Server 5.1 can read SPD Server 5.1 and SPD Server 4.x tables.
  • SPD Server 4.x tables that are modified by SPD Server 5.1 become SPD Server 5.1 tables.
  • SPD Server 3.x and SPD Server 4.x cannot read SPD Server 5.1 tables. If you have SPD Server 3.x tables, you must convert them to SPD Server 4.x tables before SPD Server 5.1 can read or open the tables.
Note: Before you begin the SPDSCONV conversion process, back up all images of the SPD Server 3.x data sets that are to be converted.