SAS Institute Inc, Cary, North Carolina has announced enhancements to the SAS System designed to open SAS System-managed data to third-party products running under Windows. The enhancements support both local and remote access to data stored in the SAS System’s relational data structures via Microsoft’s Open Data Base Connectivity standard. For local access, a new SAS ODBC driver will be packaged with the SAS System and enable Open Data Base Connectivity-compliant applications to read and process SAS data residing under the same operating environment. The driver will be included free for customers that license or upgrade to the SAS System, Release 6.10 under Windows – currently in beta test and scheduled for production later this summer. It will also be included with the next release of the SAS System for Windows NT, which is scheduled for beta test later this year. For remote access in a client-server environment, SAS Institute has launched SAS/Share Net software. This enables servers running the SAS System to receive and process requests for SAS System-managed data from third-party client applications.
Emulus
The first Application Programming Interface to be supported is Microsoft’s ODBC. The stand-alone SAS ODBC driver will be free to organisations licensing SAS/Share Net software in the server environment. At the minimum level of 10 workstations, this costs $1,500. The company has also launched a new 3270 terminal emulation package, Emulus. Now shipping, Emulus software enables RS/6000, Sun-4 and HP 9000 series users to access 3270 applications on IBM Corp mainframes using TCP/IP. The first-year licence fee for Emulus starts at $3,000 for up to 10 workstations. Finally, the company has launched InfoTap, a stand-alone software package for real-time storage and retrieval. It’s currently available for HP-UX sites, and is scheduled for production later this month for the AIX and Solaris variants of Unix. It retrieves information from news wires, other live data feeds, ASCII text, electronic mail messages, Internet news articles and Autodin messages. Users create profiles, which define their topics of interest and specify the desired data sources; then InfoTap software reads all incoming messages and delivers only those messages containing information that the user requested, the firm says.