topic Re: SAS Viya & Julia programming? in Developers

SAS Viya & Julia programming?

AhmedAl_Attar — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 16:23:07 GMT

Hi All,

With the up rise of the Julia programming language within the Data Science field, and it growing ecosystem of packages and extensions, it's quickly becoming the de-facto Open source replacement to Python & R, when it comes to numerical computing.

Having said that, are there any plans to create any kind of mechanism for integrating SAS Viya & Julia?

Thanks,

Ahmed

Re: SAS Viya & Julia programming?

ChrisHemedinger — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 13:51:31 GMT

Perhaps I'm not as tuned into all of the trending tools for data scientists, but among the SAS users I talk to they seem most interested in Python integration, followed by R -- in addition to the core SAS technologies of course.

That said, SAS Viya supports REST APIs that can be accessed by virtually any programming language. It looks as if Julia can support this with Requests.jil and JSON.jil.

And, if you're accessing SAS via Jupyter Notebooks (using Python SWAT or R SWAT or even just the sas_kernel), then you could build notebooks that mix and match capabilities from Julia and SAS at the Notebook level.

I'm not aware of a movement to build a "Julia SWAT" (similar to the Python / R support), but I'm prepared to be corrected on that by any of my colleagues who are closer to the projects.

Re: SAS Viya & Julia programming?

AhmedAl_Attar — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 20:37:48 GMT

Hi Chris,

Thank you for the feedback. I guess it would make more sense for somebody from the Julia community to build a Package that connects Julia to SAS (Be it Foundation or Viya). Similar to saspy (Which connects Python to SAS 9.4 from within Python) and all other Julia packages, including the ones you have listed in your reply.

I know, there is a very good Julia package (ReadStat.jl) that could provide a jump start for such integration with SAS from within Julia.

My original message was inspired from the exposure to Proc Lua, Proc Groovy and the ability to call R packages from Proc IML.

Regards,

Ahmed

Re: SAS Viya & Julia programming?

aaowens_sas — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 13:41:04 GMT

I know this is an old thread, but there is a new Julia package for reading SAS data files. https://github.com/tk3369/SASLib.jl has performance benchmarks showing it is considerably faster than Python Pandas and ReadStat.