SAS ODBC Driver User's Guide and Programmer's Reference

What Kinds of Data Can I Access with the SAS ODBC Driver?

In Components of ODBC Functionality and elsewhere throughout this report, we use the term SAS data sources to mean data sources that you have defined to the SAS ODBC driver. These can include not only SAS data sets, but also flat files and VSAM files, as well as data from many database management systems (DBMSs) through the use of SAS/ACCESS software. (See SAS Data Sets for details.)

If your PC is on a network, you can access both local data sources and remote data sources. (See What Software Do I Need? for information about software requirements.) Local data is data that you access through a SAS server on your local machine. The data may be stored either on your PC hard drive or on a PC network file system, such as a Netware or Windows NT file server, that makes the physical location of the data transparent to applications. Remote data is data that you access through a SAS server that is running on another (remote) machine.

The ability to use the SAS ODBC driver in conjunction with SAS/ACCESS software as a gateway to DBMS data is particularly useful under any of the following circumstances:

There is no ODBC driver for the remote DBMS. Therefore, you use the SAS ODBC driver in conjunction with SAS/ACCESS software in the remote SAS server to get ODBC connectivity.
You don't have a license for the necessary software (either an ODBC driver for the DBMS or DBMS network access software) on your client machine.
You want to join or merge DBMS data with other data on a remote host.

Currently, SAS/ACCESS software is available for the following systems, including:

ADABAS

CA-IDMS

CA-OpenIngres

DB2 under OS/390, OS/2, UNIX, and Windows

IMS-DL/I

Informix

ODBC

ORACLE

Oracle Rdb

PC File Formats*

SYBASE

SYSTEM 2000

*includes DBF, DIF, WK1, WK3, WK4, XLS4, XLS5, and XLS7 file formats.

Note: The SAS/ACCESS Interface to ODBC can be used to access many sources that provide an ODBC driver, including AS/400, SQL Server, and Microsoft Access data. [cautionend]

For information about the individual SAS/ACCESS interfaces, see Additional Documentation.

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