The following error can be issued with SAS^® 9.2 when passwords have been encrypted by PWENCODE. The same code may have worked with SAS 9.1.

ERROR: ORACLE connection error: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied. 

SAS 9.2 decoding algorithm was changed to correct the incorrect way SAS 9.1 was parsing through passed strings. It did not strip anything, but if it hit something that it did not like, it thought it was done and just continued on. In SAS 9.2, the error checking has been tightened up. There is no stripping, and it expects the length being passed to be the length of the password to handle.

This error occurs because this string now contains trailing blanks whereas in SAS 9.1 it did not.

The workaround is to use the symputx() function to read in the password which strips off the blanks.

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

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for Base SAS 9.21_M3 is available at: