Looking for a solution to a problem which I have been presented with. We currently have two separate SAS installs at our site - both 9.4M6, one is used for BASE SAS code and the other is a full stack including web services, SNA, DI amongst others. We have a user group that uses both servers and would like access to several (large > 100GB sas7bdat size) files from both systems. We normally transfer (rsync replication) over smaller files but larger data sets would be problematic to transfer in the window we have when the servers are fairly idle overnight. In the past we used to use a hosted share on one of the servers, but this also proved problematic, often leading to locked files, especially on pre-assigned libs and then delays on startup of SAS sessions waiting for timeouts to happen. It also means that we had to co-ordinate the downtime of both instances so that no jobs using these shared tables are in process of being written to from the other server or risk loss of data. Looking at SAS/SHARE - would this be a possible solution to transferring the files over wholesale each evening and also allow us to attribute file locks effectively between the two separate platforms? The other plan I am investigating is a dedicated file host that we can have both system independently attach to with the shared data sets housed on it, but again I am not sure that SAS will be able to "know" that a file is locked for single access or being written to by the other server.
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