I would like to thanks every body individually for taking your precious time and sharing your knowledge and thoughts on the issue. SAS is a carefully crafted product. It is my opinion that there must be some specific reason for using the letters TS. My question was not directed to any individual release. Anyway thanks for your time. I will be closing the question. ... View more

Thank you all for your time, interest and help. My findings are as follows. There was a batch job which gave this error. The job runs in a shared production environment.  (The job ran earlier and continues to ran thereafter without any error) After making due diligence and finding that this is created automatically and appeared to be empty. This had three columns Variable.type,length Attribut, char,8 Value,Char,200 Varname,Char,8 I re-ran the job and it ran successfully. As multiple jobs are running on the server, my presumption is that multiple batch jobs must be trying  to access the same data set (sashelp.sasmbc) , hence the error. My issue stands resolved. What remains, however, is a curiosity to know the purpose and the logic behind sashelp.sasmbc. Was hopeful that learned SAS experts would shed some light on this.     ... View more