The INDTD_PUBLISH_FORMATS macro used to load user written formats into Teradata can hang. The problem will most likely occurs when the format contains several thousand categories.

The problem occurs because the INDTD_PUBLISH_FORMATS macro uses a FILENAME pipe call to Teradata BTEQ to load the formats into the Teradata database. When there are a lot of format categories the FILENAME PIPE command to BTEQ can time-out before the format categories load into Teradata. The time-out value is set by the SAS environment variable SAS_UPIPE_PROCESS_TIMEOUT which is set by default to 120000 milliseconds, or two minutes.

To circumvent the problem you need to increase the time-out when invoking SAS as follows:

sas -set SAS_UPIPE_PROCESS_TIMEOUT 600000

In the example above, this would set the time-out value to 5 minutes.

The -set command can also be added to the SASV9.CFG file.

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