How to update a table opened in Enterprise Guide in read-only mode

[Giamma14]

Dear all,

I hope you can help me with the following. I am using Enterprise Guide and I usually open tables in read only mode in order to allow other users/processes to update them.
However, it seems that this is not the case since the tables opened seemed locked and nobody can update them.

Does this mean that if a table is opened in Enterprise Guide even in read-only mode, no other process will be able to update that table until it is closed or is there any other way I can open the table and allow it to be updated?

Thanks a lot in advance for you help, really appreciated and needed 😉

Gianmario

[Doc_Duke]

Correct. When you open a dataset (in either read-only or update modes), Windows locks it from writing by others. I'm not sure if other OS platforms work the same.

If you want multi-user update capability, you really should consider housing the data in Oracle or SQL Server -- something that is designed to handle that type of locking.

[LinusH]

I think is the regardless of OS. And I would put it that SAS decides which files to lock, and the OS lock files according to SAS rules.

Other storage options within SAS could be SAS/SHARE or SPD Server.
They could be sufficient depending on the characteristics that your application have.

/Linus

[Giamma14]

Dear Linus,

Thanks for your answer. I’m not an expert at all of the storage options you are suggesting so I’m afraid I would need some extra clarification (sorry if the questions looks stupid): could you kindly provide me some more info and a link about SAS/SHARE or SPD? Are these packages to be bought separately or are they part of Enterprise Guide?

And finally, isn't there an option to make a table opened in EG not locked so that processes that are running overnight can update it even when I'm reading it?

Gianmario

[LinusH]

There a plenty of documentation and other information (sales related) on support.sas.com or for more sales influenced information www.sas.com.

EG is a client software. SAS SHARE/SPD Server are separate licensed products (or part of some Enterprise Server/Solution packages). Since there are locking issues, I assume that your data is stored on a common server. This is where your data locking occurs. Locking is not an EG issue, it's rather a SAS server issue, and the solution to have concurrent read/update access to data is to store it in a external RDBMS or using the SAS engines/products mentioned.

/Linus

[ChrisHemedinger]

Great information by the community so far. I have only this to add...

EG 4.2 tries to mitigate this sort of issue by having the data open for shorter windows of time. When the data view is not the active window, EG usually closes the data. In addition, there are options in Tools->Options that you can set to close the data grid after so many minutes of inactivity.

There is still a chance for contention when a user is actively viewing a table that another process is trying to update or overwrite; we've just been trying to make it less likely that this will happen by coincidence.

Chris