I don't know much about stability SAS/ACCESS for DB2 stability, so I'll punt on that one. I will say I haven't heard of any problems related to SAS/ACCESS stuff in 9.2, but I'm not a SAS/ACCESS expert.
In terms of performance, there will be a significant impact using SAS/ACCESS for ODBC instead of SAS/ACCESS for DB2 when reading large tables. A SAS consultant I work with said the SAS/ACCESS products for specific databases (e.g. DB2) tend to be 4-10 times faster than the generic SAS/ACCESS for ODBC. If applicable, the database-specific SAS/ACCESS products also allow bulk-loading. This is roughly where my knowledge runs dry.
🙂
Hope that helps. I'm still someone suspicious of the claim that SAS 9.2 is not a "stable" version -- I'd have to know specifically what you were trying to do with it. It performs without a flaw on my machine. It might be worth a call to SAS Tech Support to get a sense from them if they know of any problems with upgrading.
http://support.sas.com/techsup/contact/