SAS/SHARE User's Guide

Accessing SAS Files through the Operating Environment

Data Library Access Provided by the Operating Environment shows two client sessions that access SAS files without a SAS/SHARE server.

Data Library Access Provided by the Operating Environment

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In this model, your operating environment provides two types of access: read only and read-write. With read-only access, multiple users can simultaneously read the same member or different members in the same library.

SAS files that have read-write access are typically associated with only one user. Some hosts support only read access to libraries that are accessed directly by more than one user. Other hosts permit two users to write to different files in the same SAS library but do not permit them to write to the same file simultaneously. Still other hosts permit multiple users to write to the same file at the same time, even though doing so is not safe and invariably results in lost changes made by one or more users, at best. In all cases, the only safe way for more than one user to share a SAS file (and on some hosts an entire library) is for them to use a common third-party process to serialize access to the low-level parts of the file and coordinate updates to the data.

For more information about the SAS data library model, see SAS Language Reference: Concepts.

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