When you assign a LIBNAME statement for the Microsoft SQL Server Engine on SAS^® 9.4M8 (TS1M8), the following error might occur:

ERROR: CLI error trying to establish connection: [SAS][ODBC SQL Server Wire Protocol driver]Error parsing connect string at offset ..

The reported error occurs when the password contains a semicolon character ";".

Workaround

To work around this issue, do either of the following:

• Change the password and remove the semicolon character
• Set the password enclosed in curly braces {} for the password LIBNAME option. In addition, set the LIBNAME connection  to SHAREDREAD

Here is an example:

LIBNAME test SQLSVR Datasrc=abc SCHEMA=dbo USER="abc" PASSWORD='{MyPasswor;d}' connection=SHAREDREAD;