STAT/TRANSFER Update Available

The October issue of SSCC News contained an article about STAT/TRANSFER not being able to read data sets created with the newly installed version 8 of SAS on UNIX. Because of this problem, we recommended that you first convert your SAS 8 data sets to transport files before using STAT/TRANSFER.

The developer of STAT/TRANSFER has sent us a partial fix to this problem. With this fix, STAT/TRANSFER can now read data sets created with version 8 of SAS two different ways:

1) Specify the V6 engine on the LIBNAME statement when creating SAS data sets:

      libname save v6 "~/sasdata";
      data save.aust99;

Note, that SAS will automatically use the V6 engine if the LIBNAME points to a directory containing other version 6 data set.

2) If you have SAS data sets created with the V8 engine (the default engine for version 8 when writing to a directory NOT containing version 6 files), you can rename the .sas7bdat file extension to .ssd04 and STAT/TRANSFER can then read the file. For example:

      > mv aust98.sas7bdat aust98.ssd04

This rename will not be necessary in the next release of STAT/TRANSFER.

We have applied the fix for STAT/TRANSFER installed on the WINCENTER servers and the three PCs in the 7413 Terminal Room. If you have STAT/TRANSFER installed on your PC, please contact Consultant and we will come apply the fix.

A similar problem exists with reading SAS data sets using DBMS/COPY. We have not yet received a fix.