exception handling for SAS ERROR: A lock is not available for

[Citrine10]

Hi there

We have jobs scheduled that run on Flow Manager and alot of them exit because of the ERROR: A lock is not available for xxxxxx. Is there a way to solve for this using some SAS code so that the code can retry to run?

[LinusH]

Take a look at the LOCK statment.

If this is a frequent thing you might want to look into

• Throw out SAS sessions (works if you have a server only libref)
• Move your data to a multi user engine (SAS/SHARE, SAS SPD Server or external RDBMS)
• If your users uses EG make sure they upgrade to the latest release, where locks are released from data sets automatically.

[Kurt_Bremser]

If your backend runs on a UNIX system, consider my method to remove the target dataset before writing to it, as presented in my SASGF 2021 paper.

[SASKiwi]

Are your jobs trying to update the same datasets and the same time or are other users locking them? If the updating is all under your control then there are SAS options like FILELOCKWAIT that may be helpful.