SAS® data sets created by third-party software might be used successfully with one SAS® release but might fail in a higher SAS release. An error message like the following might be issued or SAS might terminate abruptly when using a SAS data set created by third-party software:

SAS WTABORT (FREQ) The SAS System has detected an abort condition. An Exception occurred during wthtrm(). Please contact Technical Support.

Although certain procedures might run without encountering any problems, further processing of the data set can cause SAS to suddenly shut down. This problem might not occur until a customer migrates to a new SAS release. The SAS file format can change between releases in ways that other vendors trying to replicate the format cannot anticipate.

SAS does not guarantee that data sets created by third-party products will work with SAS or that they will continue to work with a later release of SAS. In addition, SAS Technical Support cannot help resolving the problem unless the behavior also occurs with a data set that was created with SAS. If the problem cannot be replicated with a data set that was created with SAS, the error should be pursued directly with the third-party vendor.

A possible workaround is to use the SET statement in SAS to create a new SAS data set from the data set that was created by third-party software. For example:

data new_data;
   set old_data;
run;

SAS cannot guarantee the integrity of any operation using the data set unless the data set is created using SAS software.