SAS EG - Check if lock is possible, else use other table - sas

Question

Hope someone can shed some light on this for me.
I have a process that uses the below table. There is a subsequent table (resource5) that has the same data as resource4 - basically I can use either table - not sure why there's two to be honest but it may come in handy here.
Both tables are updated sequentially twice an hour at irregular intervals, so I cannot schedule around them and it seems to take around 5mins to update each table.
I always need the latest available data, and other data is live so I'm hitting the table quite frequently (every 15 mins).
Is there a way to check resource4 is available to be locked by my process and if so, proceed to run the data step and if not, hit resource5 instead and if not res5 then just quit the entire process so nothing else tries (other proc sql from oracle) to run?
As long as work.resource4 appears and is usable then all is well.
All my code does is this, once it's in WORK I can do whatever without fear of an issue.
data resource4;
set publprev.resource4;
run;
ps. I'm using SAS EG in Windows to make the change, then the process is exported via a .sas file with all of the code and runs off of a Unix SAS server via crontab though a shell script which also creates a log file. Probably not the most efficient way to schedule this stuff but it is what I have.
Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use the function open to check if a table is available to you for reading (i.e. copying to WORK).
You will have to use macro to provide the name of the available data set to your DATA Step.
Example:
* NOTE: The DATA Step will automatically close resources it open()s;
%let RESOURCE=NONE AVAILABLE;
data _null_;
if open ('publprev.resource4') ne 0 then do;
call symput('RESOURCE', 'publprev.resource4');
stop;
end;
if open ('publprev.resource5') ne 0 then do;
call symput('RESOURCE', 'publprev.resource5');
end;
run;
data work.resource;
set &RESOURCE;
run;