When displaying Japanese data in Snowflake, “ERROR: Unable to transcode to UCS-2 encoding” occurs.

Yasutomi — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:01:10 GMT

Dear Members, Starting with SAS 9.4M9, when using SAS/ACCESS Interface to Snowflake 9.48, selecting Snowflake columns that contain Japanese characters results in the error “ERROR: Unable to transcode to UCS-2 encoding.”

If we change SAS’s encoding to UTF-8, the data is displayed correctly; however, we want to work with Snowflake while keeping SAS in Shift-JIS.

SAS:SAS9.4M9

Interface: SAS/ACCESS Interface to Snowflake 9.48

OS: Windows Server 2022

SAS encoding: Shift-JIS

'''sas

libname <name> snow

server="<URL>"

database="<DB name>"

schema="<SCHEMA name>"

warehouse="<WAREHOUSE name>"

user="<USER name>"

conopts="AUTHENTICATOR=SNOWFLAKE_JWT;

PRIV_KEY_FILE=<FILE name>;

PRIV_KEY_FILE_PWD=<PWD>;

TRACING=4;";

proc print data=<DB name>.<TABLE name>;

run;

'''

Does anyone have a good idea for another option to solve this problem?

Thank you.

Re: When displaying Japanese data in Snowflake, “ERROR: Unable to transcode to UCS-2 encoding” occur

Kurt_Bremser — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:30:45 GMT

In your whole environment, all components (operating systems, databases, SAS, …) need to use the same encoding, or you will always run into such issues.

topic Re: When displaying Japanese data in Snowflake, “ERROR: Unable to transcode to UCS-2 encoding” occur in SAS Programming

When displaying Japanese data in Snowflake, “ERROR: Unable to transcode to UCS-2 encoding” occurs.

Re: When displaying Japanese data in Snowflake, “ERROR: Unable to transcode to UCS-2 encoding” occur