SAS/SHARE User's Guide

Capabilities

Cross-architecture access is a feature of SAS/SHARE software that enables a server SAS session and its client sessions to execute on machines that have different architectures. That is, a server and its clients may execute on machines that have different internal representations of data such as the IBM System/390 and Intel 486, or Digital Equipment Alpha VMS and Hewlett-Packard Precision Architecture. For details about cross host connections, see Moving and Accessing SAS Files across Operating Environments.

Cross-architecture access enables you to move data or applications from one type of host to another. For example, an application on UNIX that uses a SAS library on OS/390 issues a LIBNAME statement just as an OS/390 application does, by specifying the OS/390 physical name for the SAS library and the name of the OS/390 server. For example, you can

move a SAS application from OS/390 to UNIX, leave the data on OS/390, and continue to access the data without changing the application.
move an application's data from UNIX to OS/390, leave the application on UNIX, and change only the LIBNAME statement that accesses the data.
duplicate the application on both hosts and simultaneously access the data on OS/390.

Cross-architecture access enables users to read and write SAS data across host architecture boundaries. It enables applications running on one type of host to read DBMS data that are accessed through server-managed SAS/ACCESS views when that DBMS is available only on another type of host. For example, a SAS session on a Sun workstation can use a SAS/ACCESS view to read the contents of a DB2 table on an OS/390 host. For more information about using views under SAS/SHARE software, see SAS Data View Programming Considerations.

SAS/SHARE software is particularly well-suited to applications that

require access to a single record at a time.
use a WHERE clause to subset large data sets.
execute procedures against small data sets.

An application that processes large quantities of data, especially through multiple passes, may benefit from moving a copy of the data to the computer on which it executes, or from using SAS/CONNECT software to remotely execute SAS on the computer on which the data is stored.

Neither Version 7 nor Version 8 SAS/SHARE software supports access to some types of SAS files, such as SAS catalogs, when the architecture of the server machine differs from the architecture of the client machine. See Host Differences and Restrictions and Limitations for more information.

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