topic Re: How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW in SAS Visual Analytics

How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW

arindam1984 — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 10:36:59 GMT

Hi,

I want to create SAS VA reports that runs on raw data present in Teradata EDW. The users want to have drill down fascility so that if the report show something odd then they can go to the row level information.

The process I am aware of is as follows.

1. Run code in SAS EG to create datasets with summary numbers from raw data in Teradata EDW.

2. Run code in SAS EG to push these summary datasets to HDFS/LASR.

3. SAS VA report consumes these summary data from LASR.

However if the user wants to drill down to the row level information, the summary data in LASR will not have the details. It is unrealistic to move the EDW data from Teradata to HDFS for these reporting requirements only. Is there a way to make reports in SAS VA that can dynamically fetch rows from Teradata without needing any static data in LASR/HDFS? Any help will be highly appreciated.

I am using SAS 9.4, SAS EG 5.1, SAS VA 7.1, My company is installing SAS Grid, if that helps.

Thanks

Arindam

Re: How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW

LinusH — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 14:34:40 GMT

That's a valid question, indeed.

What you are asking for is the VA equivalent to OLAP Cube drill through.

AFAIK that is not supported in VA in the present release.

Perhaps you could use a Stored Process mimic or at least present the users with a possibility to do a separate query.

Re: How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW

arindam1984 — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 15:36:12 GMT

Thanks for your reply and suggestion LinusH.

So you are suggesting to have a stored process in the SAS VA report where user will be able to write SQL and then new data will be fetched into LASR from Teradata based on the query. While this is a way to get the relevant data but can only be used if the user knows the related table and column names. For my reports this is not the case.

When you say this fascility is not supported in the current release, are you aware if such a fascility will be available in any future release?

Re: How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW

SASKiwi — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 20:07:04 GMT

SAS VA will eventually become a component of SAS Viya. When this happens most of SAS will sit on top of a VA-like in-memory processing architecture. I suspect that the sort of functionality you require is more likely (but not necessarily available) with Viya but in any case is probably several years away. In other words I wouldn't hold my breath on this...

However you may get some ideas about using stored procedures from VA to do what you want in this very interesting paper:

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings16/SAS6361-2016.pdf

Re: How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW

LinusH — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 05:00:24 GMT

Well I think that you write the SQL but it can parameterized so the user can specify a filter or which columns to show. Perhaps these parameters can be based on current status of a VA report, but that's beyond my VA knowledge.

Re: How to drill through from SAS VA to Teradata EDW

LinusH — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 06:21:13 GMT

Oh, it should be possible via linking.
See Renatos answer 2. In this thread :

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Visual-Analytics/Stored-Process-and-Visual-Analytics/m-p/304159#U304159