Hi Team
I am new to SAS administration. I have to create a base engine SAS library in SAS Management console with readonly access to SAS datasets located at a particular path.
How do make those SAS datasets readonly ?
Kindly advice.
Thanks
Rajesh
There are several options. Which to chose depends on your requirement.
If you just want to protect from accidental updates, just have the libraries not preassigned, or preassigned using Metadata library engine. This is by default a read only access.
But, if your fear that your users will try to bypass metadata engine by assigning the libname directly to the file system path, you might want to look at using Meta Bound libraries.
Define the location were the SAS library is stored as read-access at the OS level.
The datasets wil be set read-only internal by SAS automatically. As you are safe at he OS level there are no issues to solve with SAS settings.
Even the bound libraries will not protect those from copy at the OS level. SAS(R) 9.4 Guide to Metadata-Bound Libraries, Second Edition
Jaap's response, especially the item in bold, is a very good response.
I'll add one more trivially easy way to specify a library as read-only. There's a Library access field in SAS Management Console that you can use to specify a library as READONLY (that's the menu choice). See SAS(R) 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Data Administration Guide, Third Edition.
A word of caution. As easy as that setting is to configure, if that metadata setting is not also paired by restricting Write access in the operating system, a user can easily circumvent that setting by writing a program with a user-supplied LIBNAME statement to the data.
Mike and do not understand what is more trivial for restricting access to data using the OS layers. I only copied that sentence from the SAS manual.
There is more of that:
SAS(R) 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Security Administration Guide, Second Edition (cautions)
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