Interrupting a SAS Process and the Underlying DBMS Process

CAUTION:
Interrupting a SAS process and the underlying DBMS process might kill all jobs that are running on your DBMS.
Interrupting your SAS and DBMS processes should be an exception. Use care when you construct your queries. For example, if SAS sends SQL to an RDBMS, there is no way to interrupt the SQL statements because SAS no longer has control of them. The statements are running in the RDBMS.
When you interrupt a SAS process, you might terminate the current query. If you are using the current query to create a new data set, then the data set is still created even if the query is terminated. If you are using the current query to overwrite a data set, the data set is not overwritten if the query is terminated. In most cases you do not receive a warning that the query did not complete.
Note: In this section, SAS process refers to a series of events. It is not the process on the operating system. When you interrupt or terminate a SAS process, the process on the operating system might still be running.
In many cases (such as using Oracle in UNIX environments), when you interrupt or terminate a query on a server, the following processes stop:
  • processing of current extractions. For example, if you forgot to include a WHERE clause in your SQL query and are now extracting 1 billion rows into SAS, issuing an interrupt stops the SAS process and the extract step in the DBMS.
  • processing of queries that are in progress on the server. For example, you might have a very complex extract query that runs for a long time before producing a result. Issuing an interrupt stops the SAS and DBMS processes. As a result, the complex query running on your DBMS server is interrupted and terminated.
  • update, delete, and insert processing. For example, you are updating, deleting, or inserting many rows in your DBMS. An interrupt stops the SAS and DBMS processes.