Naming Conventions for SAS and Hive

For general information, see SAS Names and Support for DBMS Names.

Current versions of Hive are case insensitive for comparisons, but case is preserved for display purposes. Users can set the PRESERVE_COL_NAMES= and PRESERVE_TAB_NAMES= options (shortcut PRESERVE_NAMES=) to preserve the case of identifiers. Doing this usually is not required unless the case must be preserved for display purposes.

Hive currently does not permit a period (.) or colon (:) within a column name, and a table name cannot begin with the underscore (_) character.

SAS and Hadoop objects include tables, views, columns, and indexes. Here is how SAS handles Hive names:

• A SAS name must be from 1 to 32 characters long. When Hive column names and table names are 32 characters or less, SAS handles them seamlessly. When SAS reads Hive column names that are longer than 32 characters, a generated SAS variable name is truncated to 32 characters. Hive table names should be 32 characters or less because SAS cannot truncate a table reference. If you already have a table name that is greater than 32 characters, create a Hive table view or use the explicit SQL feature of PROC SQL to access the table.
• If truncating would result in identical names, SAS generates a unique name.
• For National Language Support, because of Hive limitations, column names must use only WLATIN1 characters. Table comments should also contain only WLATIN1 characters when the DBCREATE_TABLE_OPTS= data set option creates them using DBCREATE_TABLE_OPTS="COMMENT 'my table comment'". Although this option accepts any NLS character, the NLS portion of the comment is not displayed properly later.