SAS VIYA and Oracle Special Characters

[annamerkou]

Hello all!

I am working on SAS Studio 5 on a 3.4 VIYA installation and I am having trouble reading special characters (i.e. Greek Language) from an Oracle database. Having browsed through several posts here, I came across a possible solution (http://support.sas.com/kb/51/411.html, http://support.sas.com/kb/18/688.html), that of setting the NLS_LANG environment variable correctly according to the ORACLE encoding. In our case, this setting should be NLS_LANG=American_America.EL8ISO8859P7.

However, as the solutions mentioned before apply only to SAS 9.4, I was wondering if you might have an idea which configuration files I should update with the variable value. For example, should I update the following or maybe just the vars.yml file of the installation?

/opt/sas/spre/home/SASFoundation/bin/sasenv_local

/opt/sas/viya/config/etc/batchserver/default/sasenv_deployment

/opt/sas/viya/config/etc/workspaceserver/default/sasenv_deployment

/opt/sas/viya/config/etc/compsrv/default/sasenv_deployment

/opt/sas/viya/config/etc/connectserver/default/sasenv_deployment

Thank you very much for your help!

[alexal]

@annamerkou ,

If you are just talking about SAS Studio V, then you can set the environment variables in these files:

• /opt/sas/viya/config/etc/workspaceserver/default/workspaceserver_usermods.sh
• /opt/sas/viya/config/etc/sysconfig/compsrv/default/sas-compsrv

[annamerkou]

Thank you very much for your reply! If Studio V is not the only component in question  (eg. Studio 4) what else should be updated?

[alexal]

@annamerkou ,

I would do that in /opt/sas/spre/home/SASFoundation/bin/sasenv_local file.

[annamerkou]

Hey there again! Unfortunately, having set the environment variable both for Studio & Studio 5, the special characters stillcannot be read from Oracle. I don't if it makes any difference, the VIYA installation is MPP with one controller & one backup controller, so I updated the relevant config files in both servers.

Is there a need for restart of a specific service?

[alexal]

@annamerkou ,

Yes, you have to restart object spawner, compute server as well as runlauncher. What error did you get in your SAS log? Here is a way to verify if the environment variable was set in the SAS session:

%put SOME_VARIABLE: %sysget(SOME_VARIABLE);

[annamerkou]

Hello again @alexal , I am sorry for the belated reply!  Unfortunately my efforts did not bring any results, I still get '?' instead of greek letters. Specifically, I updated the following configuration files on both the controller & the backup controller,

/opt/sas/spre/home/SASFoundation/bin/sasenv_local

/opt/sas/viya/config/etc/workspaceserver/default/workspaceserver_usermods.sh

/opt/sas/viya/config/etc/sysconfig/compsrv/default/sas-compsrv

and subsequently restarted sas-viya-spawner-default, sas-viya-runlauncher-default and sas-viya-compute-default. '

I also checked on StudioV and Studio for the value of NLS_LANG with %sysget, as you proposed, and it seems that it is set correctly to the desired value (i.e. NLS_LANG=American_America.EL8ISO8859P7). Furthermore, the StudioV / Studio log when I run my program does not show any errors.

Is there a chance an additional config file should be modified?

Thank you once again!