Teradata metadata issues for tables

[lauren_HC]

Hello all.

At work, we access a lot of data in SAS EG through Teradata libraries.

LIBNAME exmpl TERADATA SCHEMA=myschema SERVER=tdserver;

In general, this works fine. However, one thing I've noticed is that no table metadata is readily available. For instance, in the Dictionary look-up tables, only variable count and type are present. There is no information on date created, date modified, number of observations, etc. However, the variable look-up tables are not as barren of data since they contain information about formats, length, etc. This issue persists even after checking the SAS EG option to always get the total records from DBMS tables. The "Update Library Metadata" task does not result in any updates.

This behavior is unlike other libraries on shared network drives. Those contain all table metadata.

Does anyone have insight into whether this is a metadata server configuration issue or an access rights issue? Or perhaps an entirely different issue altogether?

Please let me know if additional information would be helpful in answering this question.

[ballardw]

Not a Teradata user but the general approach would be to link to the metadata stored in Teradata and read that instead of the SAS metadata.

This is generally the case with external databases. SAS would know when the connection was made and data related but not metadata such as creation information.

[SASKiwi]

In my experience the SAS Dictionary tables are only fully populated for SAS data libraries. For external databases sourcing the missing metadata you are referring to is only possible via the system tables for those databases.