How to stop sas view to access all datasets

[Gexern]

Yes, I do understand why they want to protect the data sets, as if they are changed disaster ensues. But would it be damaging to have read, but not write access? Since if I had read access I could maybe get data from them, but not make any changes?

[Quentin]

Perfectly reasonable to ask for read access, particularly as you have it through the view already. Of course since they've got through serious lengths to hide the view from you, it's possible they're doing some trickery in the view that they don't want to let you avoid (e.g. masking sensitive data).

[Gexern]

Ah, yes, that would make sense. As it is indeed sensitive data and they "scramble" it before I see it. So it might be that!

[mkeintz]

What you might do is get them to make a view for each yearly dataset (they were yearly datasets, iirc).  They could use a single common code to mask what they want to mask in each such view.  Then you could just select from a union of the subset of view of interest to you. 

It would be a minimal one-time (or one-time per year) effort on the db manager's part.  And not only would you save time, but they would conserve a lot of computing resources for use by your colleagues.