Overview: NLS for SAS/ACCESS

National Language Support (NLS) is a set of features that enable a software product to function properly in every global market for which the product is targeted. SAS/ACCESS interfaces provide NLS through LIBNAME and SQL pass-through (connection) options and also data types.

Note: It is recommended that your SAS session encoding and your DBMS encoding be the same.

For NLS limitations that are specific to Hive, see Naming Conventions for SAS and Hive.

For more NLS information, see these titles.

Last updated: February 3, 2026