DBMS Access Using the LIBNAME Statement (4)

Accessing Other Vendors' DBMS Data

DBMS Access Using the LIBNAME Statement

Preserving Table and Column Names

When you read data from or pass data to a DBMS, you may want to preserve spaces, special characters, and case sensitivity in column or table names. You can use the SAS/ACCESS LIBNAME options PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= and PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= to preserve column names and table names, respectively.

General form, PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= and PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= options:
PRESERVE_COL_NAMES=NO | YES
PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES=NO | YES

For example, in the program below, specifying the value YES for the PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= option retains the case of the column names in the ORACLE data accessed through Oraclib.Staff.

     libname oraclib oracle
             user=kilroy password=washere
             path=oracpath preserve_col_names=yes;
     proc sql;
        create table oraclib.emps as
           (select IDnum, LName, FName
               from oraclib.staff
               where City="STAMFORD");
     quit;

The default values of these options depend on the DBMS that you are using.

For details on using these options, see the following:

If you want to use column or table names that are nonstandard to SAS variable naming conventions, you will need to use either the PROC SQL option DQUOTE=ANSI or the SAS System option VALIDVARNAME=ANY. For details about these options, see SAS Names and Support for DBMS Names in SAS/ACCESS Software for Realtional Databases. To learn more about the SQL procedure, see SAS Procedures Guide.