SOLVED: By default SAS Studio was starting the SAS workspace using the 'sas_u8' start-up script. This had the unwelcome side effect of putting DBCS into play which was then causing havoc over the ODBC channel. The specific fix was to add this assignment statement to ${SASHOME}/studioconfig/workspaceserver/workspaceserver_usermods.sh SAS_COMMAND=/opt/sas/SASFoundation/9.4/bin/sas_en  This then overrides the default setting of 'sas_u8' which was the root cause of our agita. ... View more