The ACCESS Procedure for Relational Databases Descriptors with the ACCESS Procedure 309
password-option
specifies a password.
Details
The UPDATE statement identifies an existing access descriptor or view descriptor
that you want to update. UPDATE is normally used to update database connection
information, such as user IDs and passwords. If your descriptor requires many changes,
it might be easier to use the CREATE statement to overwrite the old descriptor with a
new one.
Note: Altering a DBMS table might invalidate descriptor files that are based on the
DBMS table, or it might cause these files to be out of date. If you re-create a table, add
a new column to a table, or delete an existing column from a table, use the UPDATE
statement to modify your descriptors to use the new information.
Rules that apply to the CREATE statement also apply to the UPDATE statement.
For example, the SUBSET statement is valid only for updating view descriptors.
Note: The following statements are not supported when using the UPDATE
statement: ASSIGN, RESET, SELECT, and UNIQUE.
See Table A1.1 on page 296 for the appropriate sequence of statements for updating
descriptors.
Descriptors with the ACCESS Procedure
The ACCESS procedure works with descriptors that provide information about
DBMS objects to SAS, enabling you to access and update DBMS data from within a
SAS session or program.
There are two types of descriptors, access descriptors and view descriptors. Access
descriptors provide SAS with information about the structure and attributes of a DBMS
table or view. Typically, each DBMS table or view has a single access descriptor that
provides connection information, data type information, and names for databases,
tables, and columns.
You use an access descriptor to create one or more view descriptors, or SAS data
views, of the DBMS data. When creating a view descriptor, you select the columns and
specify criteria for the rows you want to retrieve. The figure below illustrates the
descriptor creation process. Note that an access descriptor, which contains the
metadata of the DBMS table, must be created before view descriptors can be created.
