I don't think you can do this from within one SAS program (although I'd love to been shown otherwise!).  I have some code that I created that outputs data (timestamp + descriptive text basically) to a text file (using FILENAME, FPUT, FAPPEND, etc) so I can monitor the process of an ongoing job, and you could probably combine something like that with a shell script that monitors that text file and kills the SAS job if it's not seeing progress. ... View more

That's right -  external file instead is any file that is not a SAS dataset. But to read external database you need license to SAS ACCESS to this database and ther is a special syntax using SQL. ... View more