Description of ACCESS and VIEW Files

The ACCESS procedure creates SAS files of type ACCESS and VIEW. These files are referred to as descriptor files because they describe an ADABAS database to SAS.
An ACCESS file describes the data in one ADABAS file or NATURAL Data Definition Module (DDM). The ACCESS file is a master copy of all or part of a database definition.
You grant access to the actual database by creating different views under the ACCESS file. The VIEW files can identify a subset of the data described by the ACCESS file. The data specified in a VIEW can be used in SAS in much the same way that a SAS data file is used.