Absolutely correct Chuck. /etc/profile has global effect, and alterations there will influence every user, and possibly adversely.
However, Enterprise Guide uses a login which will have an associated .profile and this might be changed with no impact on other users of the Unix server.
Prior to the SAS9 BI platform, changes were needed to the environment variables to allow Oracle and other DBMS to be accessed from a SAS session. I am not sure that is required now, but there might be some confusion arising from conflicting instructions in an Access product manual and the BI manual. Either way, detailed discussions and testing with the SysAdmin would be strongly advised.
A call to Tech Support is also probably warranted.
Kind regards
David