I'm trying to understand the difference between the generic SAS ACCESS/ODBC Engine and that or the Vendor specific ACCESS engine. In this case MySQL. Any guidance would be very much appreciated.
The ODBC ACCESS engine uses the standardized ODBC layer to connect to a database; this removes the necessity for SAS to know the specifics of the DBMS. On the machine in question, you only need the ODBC driver of the DBMS.
With ACCESS to Relational Databases for MySQL, you need the DBMS client installed and configured. But you have the luxury that SAS can make better use of DBMS-specific capabilities when doing implicit pass-through.
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