Options That Affect SAS/ACCESS Naming Behavior

To change how SAS handles case-sensitive or nonstandard DBMS table and column names, specify one or more of these options.

PRESERVE_COL_NAMES=YES

a SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME and data set option that applies only to creating DBMS tables. When set to YES, this option preserves spaces, special characters, and mixed case in DBMS column names. For more information, see the PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= LIBNAME and data setoptions.

PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES=YES

a SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME option. When set to YES, this option preserves blank spaces, special characters, and mixed case in DBMS table names. Specify the PRESERVE_NAMES=YES | NO alias if you plan to specify both the PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= and PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= options in your LIBNAME statement. Using this alias saves time when you are coding. For more information, see the PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= LIBNAME option.

DQUOTE=ANSI

a PROC SQL option. This option specifies whether PROC SQL treats values within double quotation marks as a character string or as a column name or table name. When you specify DQUOTE=ANSI, your SAS code can refer to DBMS names that contain characters and spaces that are not allowed by SAS naming conventions. Specifying DQUOTE=ANSI enables you to preserve special characters in table and column names in your SQL statements by enclosing the names in double quotation marks. To preserve table names, you must also specify PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES=YES. To preserve column names when you create a table, you must also specify PRESERVE_COL_NAMES=YES.

VALIDVARNAME=ANY

a global system option that can override the SAS naming conventions. For more information, see the VALIDVARNAME= system option.

Examples that use these options are available. The availability of these options and their default settings are DBMS-specific, so see the SAS/ACCESS documentation for your DBMS to learn how the SAS/ACCESS engine for your DBMS processes names.