Data is not a SAS data set

[Tom]

In general SAS7BDAT file format has been very portable.

The one issue I remember that caused trouble was the introduction some type of larger integer values used for some type of internal record number with 64bit versions of SAS that caused the files to be unreadable on 32bit version of SAS.  The fix was to re-create the file with the 64bit verison of SAS with the proper dataset option to use the older shorter values instead.  Then the file could be read with the 32bit SAS.

(I have forgotten the field and/or dataset option name)

[ballardw]

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@Tom wrote:

In general SAS7BDAT file format has been very portable.

The one issue I remember that caused trouble was the introduction some type of larger integer values used for some type of internal record number with 64bit versions of SAS that caused the files to be unreadable on 32bit version of SAS.  The fix was to re-create the file with the 64bit verison of SAS with the proper dataset option to use the older shorter values instead.  Then the file could be read with the 32bit SAS.

(I have forgotten the field and/or dataset option name)

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I think this is EXTENDOBSCOUNTER which could be a system option, data set option or libname option. That is what I was thinking of when I asked about versions earlier.The default for all three is YES and would need to be set to NO for a 32-bit to be able to read the data set. IF the file has enough records (more than 2,147,483,647) then the header information may not be correct for reporting the number of observations as that is the limit for the 32-bit info.

I had run into that when SAS 9.3 came out but I was using 9.2.