topic Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise) in All Things Community

SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

azarins — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:37:04 GMT

We are currently running SAS 9.4 on premise. We are aware that SAS Viya is a preferred future state, based in the cloud, and that most new functionality is being delivered with Viya. Is there an official end of life date for SAS 9.4 on prem? Would need to know in order to plan our transition to Viya/Cloud.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Reeza — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 14:58:48 GMT

I don't think there's an official date, but 9.3 released in 2011 is still supported today, so you'll have a while at least since 9.4 is still the 'current release'.

https://support.sas.com/en/technical-support/services-policies.html#non-current

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

ChrisHemedinger — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:23:09 GMT

To answer the main thrust of your question, standard support for SAS 9.4 will be with us for a long time yet.

See What's Next for SAS 9 and SAS Enterprise Guide (shared at SAS Explore 2023).

Even after standard (full) support ends, that isn't the same as "end of life". You can continue to renew/run such products and SAS support will answer questions, but fixes for new problems (even security fixes) aren't guaranteed.

For your planning purposes today, I suggest you reach out to your SAS account representative -- or start with SAS Technical Support. They can help provide answers that relate to your particular mix of products.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

LoriGoldman — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 01:33:17 GMT

@ChrisHemedinger are you implying that SAS 9.4 will be the last fully supported release of SAS?

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

SASKiwi — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 02:39:30 GMT

@LoriGoldman - The Support Services link:

https://support.sas.com/en/technical-support/services-policies.html#4e974a97-1c93-41bf-8120-d0269200eebf

indicates that SAS 9.4 will have standard support up to 1 Jan 2025. AFAIK there will not be anymore SAS 9 releases after 9.4.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

JuanS_OCS — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 08:28:30 GMT

Hi @LoriGoldman ,

just to complete on @ChrisHemedinger and @SASKiwi last responses:

I cannot say if there will be more maintenances of SAS 9.4 (probably some more yes), but I can say that after SAS 9 SAS Institute has put out there SAS Viya, which is healthy moving forward and growing. The current version for on-premises is SAS Viya 3.5, and the last version is SAS Viya 4, which currently is supported only for the Microsoft Azure cloud.

In short, there is SAS for a long while, as @ChrisHemedinger indicated.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Juan

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 10:06:17 GMT

Given the many deficiencies I see in Viya (just look at the numerous procedures/statements/functions not available in CAS), I see it as a nice appendix for those who want to deliver heavy-duty analysis like VA to non-SAS-savvy end users, but for close to 100% of my current work, Viya is simply unusable.

I expect that "Base SAS" will be with us for a VERY long time.

What I expect sooner or later is a version 10 (with 64 or 128 character names for datasets and variables, for instance).

My .02

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 12:30:49 GMT

SAS 9.4 continues to be supported and enhanced to accommodate the latest security fixes, technology changes (example: the recent removal of Adobe Flash dependencies from the stack), and integration points with SAS Viya. As @Kurt_Bremser says, it's an extremely capable offering that many customers depend on, and not all use cases can be met in SAS Viya (yet). The SAS support policy is designed to make the support roadmap clear so that SAS customers can plan. SAS 9.x will be with us and relevant for many years.

Meanwhile, SAS Viya features/capabilities are introduced in regular "continuous delivery" fashion, usually with monthly releases. Currently SAS Viya runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud, but more providers and options (including on-premise options) are in the roadmap. A great way to stay informed: subscribe to the SAS Viya Release Updates board. New "shows" each month with links to the details for What's New.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

SASKiwi — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 19:22:44 GMT

@JuanS_OCS - Nice reply. I should have been a bit more precise with my response, in that AFAIK SAS is not currently planning anymore major SAS 9 releases beyond 9.4, like 9.5 etc. There could well be more maintenance releases beyond M7.

It appears most development effort is focused on Viya 2020 (the official name of the latest version). One of the limitations of Viya 2020 is that SAS/Studio is the only development interface. Enterprise Guide is not supported. I find this disappointing given the major improvements in EG8. Are there any plans for more than one modern development interface for Viya 2020? And yes I know that in theory you could use the SAS Windowing Environment with Viya if you have SAS/CONNECT but I wouldn't regard that as a viable alternative.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Quentin — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 20:00:05 GMT

Just to add to the evidence that 9.4 will have a long life, there are now SAS documentation pages that refer to 9.4M8 being planned for release in Q4 of 2022. And 9.4M8 would then have full support for 5 years (through 2027).

This page on log4j https://support.sas.com/en/security-bulletins/log4j-v1-vulnerabilities.html says "SAS intends to eliminate usage of Log4j v1 in the future release SAS® 9.4M8 (TS1M8). At this time, the estimated release date for SAS 9.4M8 is in the fourth quarter of 2022."

And this problem note https://support.sas.com/kb/68/071.html describes a planned change for M8.

So it's coming (if slowly : ).

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Quentin — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 20:25:01 GMT

So, I just had a meeting with our IT group that runs our 9.4 server, and they started the meeting by stating that :

"SAS 9.4 is moving from Standard Support to Limited Support in 2025 and no new fixes will be implemented after that therefore it will present a cybersecurity risk."

I spent the next half hour trying to convince them that they were misunderstanding the SAS support policy.

https://support.sas.com/en/technical-support/services-policies.html#maintenance

They were focused on this table:

I asked them to read the part above, which states that every release has 5 years of standard support:

I told them that 9.4M8 was expected this year, and that it would have 5 years of standard support. They were not convinced by me, but said they would call our account rep. Hopefully the account rep will be able to explain the 9.4 support policy to them (and won't use it as an opportunity to try to up-sell them on Viya).

I think the above table of 9.4 generally available dates could be made much clearer by adding the end of standard support date for each maintenance release. As I understand this table, 9.4M0-M6 will have standard support through Dec 31, 2024, because of the 5 year grace period. 9.4M7 will have standard support through end of July 2025 because it gets 5 years of standard support. Assuming 9.4M8 has a general availability date some time Fall 2022, it would have standard support until Fall 2027.

Is that how other folks read it, that each maintenance release of 9.4 will have 5 years of standard support?

Are other folks having similar problems with their IT groups reading this policy as saying that 9.4 is approaching limited support?

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

SASKiwi — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:10:41 GMT

There is certainly no harm in clarifying the support period for SAS 9.4M8. I too would expect that this would be five years. I expect M8 will be added to the Tech Support page once released and the full support period specified. It's just that 9.4M0 - M7 will all be at least five years old by 2025, although M7 not until Aug 2025 so that does create some confusion.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

FreelanceReinh — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:30:21 GMT

Thanks, @Quentin, for bringing this up again. I hope I'm wrong, but that "five-year grace period" for SAS 9.4 "starting on January 1, 2020" sounds to me like overriding the (implied?) grace periods for individual maintenance releases of the product SAS 9.4.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Quentin — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:51:00 GMT

@FreelanceReinh wrote:

Thanks, @Quentin, for bringing this up again. I hope I'm wrong, but that "five-year grace period" for SAS 9.4 "starting on January 1, 2020" sounds to me like overriding the (implied?) grace periods for individual maintenance releases of the product SAS 9.4.

Thanks @FreelanceReinh , that's how my IT group is reading it as well. : (

@ChrisHemedinger , is there someone who could give an official end of Standard Support date for 9.4M7?

If 9.4M7 hits end of Standard Support on July 31, 2025, then I would tell my IT group I'm right, not to worry, once M8 is released it will have 5 years of Standard Support from its general availability date.

If 9.4M7 hits end of Standard Support on Dec 31, 2024, then I'll need to tell my IT that they were right, and that they should start making plans now for mitigating risks of running a production SAS server under limited support, or making plans to get rid of the SAS server : (

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Quentin — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 22:03:05 GMT

Oooh @FreelanceReinh , I found a better table. It shows 9.4M7 is getting the full 5 years from it's release date.

As I had hoped, the 5 year grace policy is for 9.4M0-9.4M6.

So reasonable to expect that 9.4M8 will also get the full 5 years of Standard Support.

https://support.sas.com/en/technical-support/support-levels.html

I really really really hope 9.4M8 is released the fall, so that I can finally convince my IT department that SAS 9.4 isn't dead yet. : )

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Reeza — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 22:10:42 GMT

Viya isn't so bad, assuming Studio doesn't go away as well.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Quentin — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 22:30:30 GMT

I’m sure it’s not! But as my IT group wants out of SAS, I’m not likely to talk them into Viya. But if IT does drop SAS, I’ll certainly see if I convince my boss to spin up a Viya environment for our department.

Working for a huge company is hard. We had a departmental SAS server years ago. Then IT decided to centralize everything so we had to give up our server and move to the big IT sas server. Which was great, because they managed it and we could just code. But now I think they’re tired of managing a sas server. And they’re using a misreading of SAS support policy to justify transitioning away from SAS (toward snowflake/data bricks/etc)

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

ChrisHemedinger — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 13:35:48 GMT

@Quentin SAS 9.4 Maint 8 is on track for release near the end of 2022. And you are correct, per the current policy, the Standard Support for M8 level would extend to end of 2027 (5 years from its release). Maintenance releases contain important fixes and improvements for security, updated operating systems, and targeted fixes (including more integration with SAS Viya). "Support policy" notwithstanding, as I type this in Sept 2022 I hope that most everyone has adopted at least Maint 6 (released nearly 4 years ago).

SAS Viya is where the major investment is happening with new features and new ways to access/deploy. In addition to SAS Studio improvements for coders and non-coders, we've seen new ways to code using the official VS Code extension.

SAS 9.4 isn't going away soon and has no "retirement" date in the current roadmap. We know that lots of SAS customers rely on SAS 9.4, and even those who are adopting SAS Viya for certain projects still depend on their existing SAS for lots of production work.

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

Quentin — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 17:54:56 GMT

Just to keep this alive, there is still no end-of-life date for SAS 9.

The big news from SAS Explore is not only is there (of course) 5 years of full support for 9.4M8 (released Jan 2023), SAS is working now on the next release of SAS 9. There was a SAS 9 table in the demo room, with a big sign "what features do you want in the next release of SAS9?"

@ChrisHemedinger shares all the details in this blog post:

https://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2023/09/29/sas-9-and-sas-eg/

Re: SAS 9.4 end of life date (on premise)

SASKiwi — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 21:54:30 GMT

@Quentin - That is indeed excellent news! Could it be that SAS 9.5 is resurrected from the grave along with the promise to break through the 32 character limit for table and column names?! I live in hope...

I also think it is a smart move to support Enterprise Guide on Viya. There appears to be a growing trend among SAS customers to go "hybrid". That is to retain SAS 9.4 for core business use and well as adding Viya to the mix for more specialist roles. That way you remove the pain of migrating existing applications to Viya so that platform can be used for its new analytical, reporting and modelling capabilities. That's certainly the approach we are taking where I work.