With releases prior to SAS^® 9.1.3 SP4, the following error message is generated when you append a SAS data set to a Sybase table with a column of type VARCHAR and the column is greater than 255 characters in length:

ERROR: Error trying to read from a DBMS table. At least one column must be selected.   
NOTE: Statements not processed because of errors noted above.
NOTE: The following 1 column(s) in MYSYBASE.testvarchar have been
      automatically dropped because they have a datatype that is not
      supported by this engine:
      var1

The problem occurs because the data buffer is not cleared. The data that is appended retains the data from the previous line if that line is longer than the current line. SAS also changes the length of the character variable to 1024 if the variable is greater than 255 in length.

In SAS^® 9.1.3 SP4 and SAS^® 9.2, you will receive garbage data because VARCHAR columns allow lengths greater than 255 and you will not receive the above error.

Select the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for SAS 9.1.3 (9.1 TS1M3) for this issue is available at:

A fix for this issue for SAS/ACCESS Interface to Sybase 9.21 is available at: