SAS/ACCESS Views

A SAS/ACCESS view is an interface view, also called a view descriptor, which accesses DBMS data that is defined in a corresponding access descriptor.

Version 6 of SAS/ACCESS software enabled you to create an access descriptor and one or more view descriptors to define and access some or all of the data described by one DBMS table or DBMS view. You could also use view descriptors to update DBMS data, with certain restrictions. Descriptors continue to work in SAS software if they were available for your DBMS in Version 6.

Beginning in Version 7, some SAS/ACCESS products now provide a dynamic LIBNAME engine interface. If available, it is recommended that you use SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME statement to assign a SAS libref to your DBMS data because it is more efficient and easier to use than access descriptors and view descriptors.

The SAS/ACCESS dynamic LIBNAME engine enables you to treat DBMS data as if it were SAS data by assigning a SAS libref to DBMS objects. This means that you can use both native DATA step views and native PROC SQL views to access DBMS data instead of view descriptors.

SAS Institute continues to support SAS/ACCESS views that were created for previous versions of SAS.

See Accessing Data in a DBMS or the SAS/ACCESS documentation for your database for more information about SAS/ACCESS features.

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