SUPPORT / SAMPLES & SAS NOTES
Problem Note 16337: SAS/ACCESS® Interface to OLE DB does not support the DBTYPE_VARIANT data type
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When you use SAS/ACCESS Interface to OLE DB to access a DBMS table that contains a column whose data type is DBTYPE_VARIANT, the following error will be returned:
ERROR: At least one of the columns in this DBMS table has a datatype that is not supported by this engine.
To determine if any of your columns are of this type, submit the following SQL procedure:
proc sql;
connect to oledb(...connection-info);
create table work.cols as select * from connection to
oledb(OLEDB::Columns,,table_name);
quit;
Once this code runs, open the SAS data set WORK.COLS. The DATA_TYPE for a variant field is 12.
As a workaround, either change the data type or pass the DBMS-specific query that would convert this data type to a type (such as CHAR) that is supported.
Operating System and Release Information
| Product Family | Product | System | SAS Release | |
| Reported | Fixed* | |||
| SAS System | SAS/ACCESS Interface to OLE DB | Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition | 9.1 TS1M3 | 9.2 TS2M3 |
| Microsoft Windows XP Professional | 9.1 TS1M3 | 9.2 TS2M3 | ||
| Microsoft Windows 2000 Server | 9.1 TS1M3 | |||
| Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition | 9.1 TS1M3 | 9.2 TS2M3 | ||
| Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server | 9.1 TS1M3 | |||
| Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server | 9.1 TS1M3 | |||
| Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition | 9.1 TS1M3 | 9.2 TS2M3 | ||
| Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional | 9.1 TS1M3 | |||