Here is the response I received from SAS TS. It appears SAS does not provide must support it relates to the OS and third party drivers. This is why The Hartford is planning to migrate from SAS within the next 4 years. I received confirmation that these options should be supported as DSN options (which is expected). Unfortunately we do not have the authentication built into the engine options at this time. The CONOPTS is the best bet, but I haven't had a chance to test it for myself yet. In general, the way I like to think about the authentication is that it is primarily handled outside of SAS. It is a method configured at the system level and SAS only needs to be pointed to it with the relevant options. So in short, so long as the authentication is working outside of SAS it should have no issues in SAS. However this also limits how much documentation we typically maintain since its not a SAS process. Note that I have experienced issues trying to construct a defined DSN connection to our Snowflake private link using our DataDirect ODBC manager.  We must leverage DataDirect since we have this ODBC manager and driver defined for SQL Server already.  Only one odbc.ini file can be referenced. Currently our connections can only be supported using DSN less connections, which it appears to the method that SAS mainly implemented for Snowflake.   With the cost of these connectors and the lack of true support, I will expect other companies will be abandoning SAS soon. ... View more

A full backup would not be managed by SAS. This should be part of your headless Linux server setup. Any system should have a backup policy in place, for the OS and application. If not then you will have to perform a Tar backup of the SAS installation file systems for foundation and configuration. ... View more

The SASHFADD utility provides a download script, which downloads all hotfixes into one directory so this will not be an issue. Deployment manager will apply them in the proper order if required. The main concern is to ensure there are no SAS processes/jobs and services running on the platform since this will most cause the hotfix deployment to fail. Make sure you have a current full backup before applying just in case. If there are no reason (current issue to address) then might want to consider only applying alert hotfixes. ... View more

I agree this is a very sticky issue. Since we are planning our migration to SAS 9.2, we have also have the same question but will mostly likely leverage IWA if is available for us. The reason for this is that many of our users end up locked their accounts before realizing they must reset their passwords. This does not just impact just the SAS activity since this will also lock them out of their accounts on the their PCs, impact Outlook and network access. The security is still in place and this will minimize impact on the users. We have 500 current users and will expanding to 900 after our upgrade and migration - SAS EBI migration. Which security method did you end up using ? ... View more

Is there any best practices to use for dates within the Add-in, Excel and pivot tables ? Thank you, John Mathieu ... View more