The LIBNAME Statement for Relational Databases

DB_LENGTH_SEMANTICS_BYTE= LIBNAME Option

Indicates whether CHAR/VARCHAR2 column lengths are specified in bytes or characters when creating an Oracle table.

Default value:	YES
Valid in:	SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME statement
DBMS support:	Oracle

Syntax

DB_LENGTH_SEMANTICS_BYTE=YES | NO

YES: specifies that CHAR and VARCHAR2 column lengths are specified in characters when creating an Oracle table. The byte length is derived by multiplying the number of characters in SAS with DBSERVER_MAX_BYTES= value.
NO: specifies that CHAR and VARCHAR2 column lengths are specified in bytes when creating an Oracle table. The CHAR keyword is also added next to the length value to indicate that this is the character, not byte, length. For fixed-width encoding, the number of characters is derived by dividing the byte length in SAS for the variable by the value in DBCLIENT_MAX_BYTES=. For variable-width encoding, the number of characters remains the same as the number of bytes.

This option is appropriate only when creating Oracle tables from SAS. It is therefore ignored in other contexts, such as reading or updating tables.

Length values chosen for variable-width encodings might be more than what is actually needed.