In reply to jaap karman.

Hi Japp

Thanks for your comments!

So like anyone who has used SAS for any length of time will quickly realize, there are at least 7 ways to do any one thing in SAS - 2 of which will be completely inefficient! I say that in jest, but the approach you provide for specifying the oracle connection details in the SAS program assumes that (a) you like typing and (b) you like hardcoding - neither of which I am a fan. There are situations where we do see this - for example, when the sys admin won't allow you to update the global tnsnames entry - but generally, I like to write once and use where we can without duplication.

Also your comment about servers is absolutely right. there are a ton of new servers and I have a distinct bias, that most everything I write about is related to "servers" in the truest sense of physical (or virtualized) multi-user server environments such as UNIX, mainframe or Windows server class machines. Since this blog entry was addressed to SAS administrators, I don't consider managing your PC as a SAS admin function unless we are referring to client deployments.

--greg