In our company we use datadirect on a redhat 7 based installation of SAS to access data on a MSSQL server.
The MSSQL server provides UTF8, but columns are generally stored as type VARCHAR, which is not UTF8. Changing the type of VARCHAR columns to NVARCHAR in the database is not an option. It is also not feasible to create views that cast all VARCHAR columns to NVARCH on the MSSQL server.
Presently we are working around the problem by casting the columns in SAS code which works fine. Analysts wish to get rid of the casts in the code. They want transparent access to VARCHAR columns as if they were NVARCHAR.
Is there a way to achieve this by driver configuration?