topic Why are VARCHAR lengths from Snowflake tripled in SAS DI Studio? in SAS Data Management

Why are VARCHAR lengths from Snowflake tripled in SAS DI Studio?

jozumfoen — Thu, 22 May 2025 13:03:19 GMT

Hi everyone,

I’m accessing Snowflake tables through SAS Data Integration Studio using the Snowflake connector.

When I register table from Snowflake in SAS DI, I noticed that VARCHAR(n) columns are automatically assigned LENGTH=3n in SAS metadata.
For example: VARCHAR(2) becomes LENGTH=6.

Why does this happen, even though both systems use UTF-8?

Thanks in advance!

Why are VARCHAR lengths from Snowflake tripled in SAS DI Studio?

jozumfoen — Thu, 22 May 2025 13:20:51 GMT

Hi everyone,

I’m accessing Snowflake tables through SAS Data Integration Studio using the Snowflake connector.

When I register table from Snowflake in SAS DI, I noticed that VARCHAR(n) columns are automatically assigned LENGTH=3n in SAS metadata.
For example: VARCHAR(2) becomes LENGTH=6. Why does this happen, even though both systems use UTF-8?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Why are VARCHAR lengths from Snowflake tripled in SAS DI Studio?

Kurt_Bremser — Thu, 22 May 2025 13:40:54 GMT

My first idea would be that Snowflake counts UTF characters, while SAS counts bytes.

Re: Why are VARCHAR lengths from Snowflake tripled in SAS DI Studio?

SASKiwi — Thu, 22 May 2025 20:14:55 GMT

We use SAS/ACCESS Interface to Snowflake too and see the same behaviour.

A Google search suggests that this could be standard Snowflake behaviour: https://community.snowflake.com/s/article/Varchar-length-implicitly-increases-if-column-is-Uppercased

Re: Why are VARCHAR lengths from Snowflake tripled in SAS DI Studio?

Patrick — Mon, 26 May 2025 07:37:32 GMT

It's certainly worth to look into options DBCLIENT_MAX_BYTES and DBSERVER_MAX_BYTES