SAS/ACCESS 9.2 for Relational Databases: Reference, Fourth Edition

SAS Names and Support for DBMS Names 4 Naming Behavior When Retrieving DBMS Data 15Options That Affect SAS/ACCESS Naming BehaviorTo change how SAS handles case-sensitive or nonstandard DBMS table and columnnames, specify one or more of the following options.PRESERVE_COL_NAMES=YESis a SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME and data set option that applies only to creatingDBMS tables. When set to YES, this option preserves spaces, special characters,and mixed case in DBMS column names. See “PRESERVE_COL_NAMES=LIBNAME Option” on page 166 for more information about this option.PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES=YESis a SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME option. When set to YES, this option preservesblank spaces, special characters, and mixed case in DBMS table names. See“PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= LIBNAME Option” on page 168 for more informationabout this option.Note: Specify the alias PRESERVE_NAMES=YES | NO if you plan to specifyboth the PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= and PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= options inyour LIBNAME statement. Using this alias saves time when you are coding. 4DQUOTE=ANSIis a PROC SQL option. This option specifies whether PROC SQL treats valueswithin double quotation marks as a character string or as a column name or tablename. When you specify DQUOTE=ANSI, your SAS code can refer to DBMSnames that contain characters and spaces that are not allowed by SAS namingconventions. Specifying DQUOTE=ANSI enables you to preserve specialcharacters in table and column names in your SQL statements by enclosing thenames in double quotation marks.To preserve table names, you must also specify PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES=YES.To preserve column names when you create a table, you must also specifyPRESERVE_COL_NAMES=YES.VALIDVARNAME=ANYis a global system option that can override the SAS naming conventions. See“VALIDVARNAME= System Option” on page 423 for information about this option.The availability of these options and their default settings are DBMS-specific, so see theSAS/ACCESS documentation for your DBMS to learn how the SAS/ACCESS engine foryour DBMS processes names.Naming Behavior When Retrieving DBMS DataThe following two tables illustrate how SAS/ACCESS processes DBMS names whenretrieving data from a DBMS. This information applies generally to all interfaces. Insome cases, however, it is not necessary to specify these options because the optiondefault values are DBMS-specific. See the documentation for your SAS/ACCESSinterface for details.