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Thursday, 9 May 2013

NOTE: Metadata-Bound Libraries - Updates at SGF 2013 #sasgf13

Back in November last year I mentioned Metadata-Bound Libraries. This v9.3 M2 (and above) functionality allows you to force access to your data through metadata libraries, thereby enforcing your metadata security plans.

One of the nuggets of information I learned at SAS Global Forum 2013 was that v9.4 will introduce menus in SAS Management Console to ease the effort of building PROC AUTHLIB code. Plus, the process of unbinding data sets from the metadata libraries will be made easier and simpler. Currently, one has to copy the data sets to an unbound library; v9.4 will allow unbinding to be performed in-place.

In a future release, administrators will optionally be able to make encryption compulsory for all data sets and libraries; and support for AES encryption will be provided. Finally, the metadata server will be able to store the encryption key and send it (encrypted) when required. This will remove the current need to hard-code keys into batch code (and thereby remove the security weakness).