The answer given by Joe has some helpful information, but I actually discovered that SAS has a (somewhat automatic) method for handling this. When you query data from an RDBMS, SAS will actually replace any column names starting with numbers with an underscore for the first character. So 1994Q4 becomes _994Q4. Thus, you can simply access the data that way.
SAS will, however, preserve the original name from the RDBMS as the variable title, so it will display as 1994Q4 (or whatever) in table view mode.