In my view, one of the advantages of using pass-through is that you can be sure that the code, table joins, etc is processed by the DBMS engine. With libname access, SAS may not be able to pass the code to the DBMS for processing. As a result, expensive table joins may be passed in their entirety back to SAS to handle -- which increases network traffic, table sizes, processing time, etc. However, libname method can be much easier to work with since you can dispense with having to use DBMS-specific code. If joins and code are fairly straightforward, and I am fairly confident that SAS will pass the query to the DBMS for processing, then I will use the libname method. Otherwise, I use pass-through.
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