AhmedAl_Attar Tracker

Re: Any success with a SAS upgrade?

AhmedAl_Attar — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:42:39 GMT

Before attempting to Upgrade in Place, I would highly advise running the SAS 9 system evaluation application which is part of the Contents Assessment Tool

"SAS 9 system evaluation uncovers known deployment issues you might have that would cause Upgrade in Place to fail. Information was gathered from various customers who experienced issues in the past when using this method. SAS discovered there are some key items we can check and fix before our customers try to upgrade (i.e. an expired license or what’s installed doesn’t match the order). The system evaluation was built to expose those issues so they can be fixed before the upgrade. Running the evaluation is not a guarantee that every issue will be found, however it will reduce the risk that your upgrade will fail."

Ensure SAS 9.4 M9 is supported on your current OS version

Windows platforms

Windows Server 2025, 2022, 2019, 2016 are supported for SAS 9.4M9.
Windows 11 and Windows 10 (64‑bit) are also supported for workstation-style deployments.

UNIX/Linux platforms

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10, 9.1+ within 9.x, and 10.x (within the 10.x family) are supported.
Oracle Linux 8.10, 9.1+ within 9.x, and 10.0+ (within 10.x) are supported, along with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3+.

AIX and mainframe

IBM AIX 7.2 with TL5 and IBM AIX 7.3 are listed as supported UNIX platforms for SAS 9.4M9.
On the mainframe, SAS 9.4M9 runs on IBM z/OS V3R1 or later.

Hope this helps

Re: Migration- SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya - Spk file export

AhmedAl_Attar — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:14:51 GMT

Hi @Somu

Disclaimer: I have not been involved in such migration before, but what I know

- The SAS Contents Assessment tool has an option to examine all your existing SAS Programs (*.sas) and identify issues related to hard coded paths and other stuff that may not be applicable to your new Viya Platform.

- Other consideration for your SAS programs would be to determine whether or not to CAS enable them, and which part?

- Your SAS data sets will need to have utf-8 encoding, and this may involve converting them if they have been using another encoding such as Latine1 or something else.

- Your current SAS Formats catalogs, would need to be rebuilt using utf-8 encoding, which may involve reverse engineering if these formats don't have associated scripts/programs to re-create them.

Long Story Short -- Migration is a lengthy process and needs to be planned and phased out on several stages/phases. Such decisions should pay attention to business needs and priorities, resource availability and skills sets, plus many other factors.

Try to watch these recorded webinars to see what others had gone through in their migration journey

Hope this helps

Re: Connect to SAS server from R via SAS JDBC - dbConnect() Error

AhmedAl_Attar — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:05:44 GMT

Just as an FYI, Enterprise Guide is a .NET software which does not use JDBC protocol.

EG uses connection profile, which stores information such as

- Connection name:

- Connection Description:

- Metadata Server name

- Port : 8591 (Default)

- UserName:

- UserPW:

Your username has to be registered in the SAS Metadata base in order to authenticate you first, before it can figure out your authorization settings.
So if you don't have to SAS Enterprise Guide, contact your "SAS experts"/SAS Admin and verify you are registered and authorized to access the SAS deployment

Re: Connect to SAS server from R via SAS JDBC - dbConnect() Error

AhmedAl_Attar — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:02:46 GMT

@andre_young

I personally try to verify connection using multiple software packages where possible.
I would recommend finding another JDBC supporting software be it free, such as DBeaver Community Edition, or commercial, whichever you can get access to, to try connecting to SAS via JDBC.

In the past, I have discovered different packages have different level of support to standard protocols such JDBC/ODBC. Even Driver providers, have different level of supporting/implementing Driver Specifications.

Just a thought

Re: Connect to SAS server from R via SAS JDBC - dbConnect() Error

AhmedAl_Attar — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:34:18 GMT

@andre_young

Have a look into this guide for connection examples
SAS 9.4 Drivers for JDBC: Cookbook

Look on page 26 (32/58), at the bottom, there is JDBC URL connection example

Hope it helps

Re: wide or long structure

AhmedAl_Attar — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:25:24 GMT

Hi @Ronein

One technique I've been using to reduce my SAS data set size, is setting my Integer numeric variable to length of 3 instead of the default 8!

Where these integer values are typically used to store Boolean flags (0/1, True/False) for modeling purposes. But if you intent to use these integers for aggregations, then keeping them with the default length of 8, would preserve their precision.

Check this SAS on-line help SAS Help Center: Numeric Precision for more details.

Hope this helps

Re: SAS 9 Content Assessment

AhmedAl_Attar — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:14:15 GMT

@RexDeus9
Can you please clarify what do you mean by multiple servers?

Is it

Multiple tiers (Meta, Compute, Web)
OR
Multiple instances of each tier (Meta, MetaN, Comp1, Comp2, CompN, Web, WebN)

@GerryNelson any insight/tips you can share here?

Re: SAS 9 Content Assessment

AhmedAl_Attar — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:47:20 GMT

Hi @RexDeus9
Have a look at this blog https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2021/07/23/how-to-use-the-sas-9-content-assessment-tool/?msclkid=bfef1e72c7e711ec90c9d3ffa50f819e

And this Tech Support doc: https://support.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/technical-papers/sas-content-assessment-proven-practice.pdf

Hope this helps

Re: Real Time of Proc Contents High Using RSubmit

AhmedAl_Attar — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:45:16 GMT

Hi @Kastchei

Regardless of the size of your data set, most of the information provided by Proc Contents are already stored in the SAS supplied data dictionary tables/view!

Proc contents displays the metadata (data dictionary) of a SAS dataset, including variable names, types, lengths, and attributes like labels and formats. It is also used to view the structure of a library or a specific table, showing information such as the number of observations, variables, and when the dataset was created. This makes it a valuable tool for understanding a dataset, verifying that data was imported correctly, and performing more intelligent data processing.

Guess what, as soon as you assign a libname that contains your SAS data set(s), SAS behind the scenes gathers all the metadata about your SAS data sets.

Check this paper Exploring DICTIONARY Tables and Views for more details.

Note: Running proc contents does not require splitting your data set, regardless of how big it is.

Hope this helps

Re: Parallel Execution in SAS Studio Flows on Compute

AhmedAl_Attar — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:40:38 GMT

Hi @PhilGUK

Considering what you have mentioned "We are SAS Studio Version: Stable 2025.09", it sounds like you are running/using SAS Viya!!

While Lift (v9 code) and Shift (run on Viya compute) is possible, it does not always give you all the performance enhancements that comes with Viya!!

If you have the option/ability to convert your existing/current SAS V9 code to utilize CAS and CASL, you may find yourself not needing explicit Parallel code execution, because CAS and CASL does that implicitly behind the scenes for you and cuts down the 50 min processing to much lower.

Just a thought, hope it gives you another perspective

Re: ODS TableEditor tagset: programmatically creating a pivot table whose source is an AMO dataset

AhmedAl_Attar — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:33:08 GMT

Hi @sascis

Do you know exactly which SAS solution bundle your organization have deployed?

If your SAS Deployment happens to have SAS OLAP server part of the bundle, then you would be able to build a SAS OLAP Cube and open it from within Excel Pivot Table.

Alternatively -

Check this video https://video.sas.com/detail/videos/version-8/video/5978114907001/version-8:-interacting-with-sas-data-in-a-microsoft-excel-pivottable-with-the-sas-add-in-for-microsoft-office?autoStart=true
Create and Save Excel Workbooks that connects to SAS Server and exposes the SAS data set(s) in Pivot tables
Allow Read-only access to your users, where they would be able to interact and Slice & Dice the data via the Pivot table interface, but not saving their changes/edits. They would be able to export/save-as into a another/personal copy as and when needed!

Hope this gives you a useable work-around

Ahmed

Re: ODS TableEditor tagset: programmatically creating a pivot table whose source is an AMO dataset

AhmedAl_Attar — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:30:44 GMT

Does this paper More Than Just a Pretty Face: Using the SAS® Output Delivery System to Create Microsoft Excel Worksheets That Answer Those Difficult Questions answer your question. Check page 11, it has an example using Data Range from a different sheet

Hope this helps

Re: Sharing SAS Notebooks on GitHub

AhmedAl_Attar — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:37:11 GMT

@NicolasRobert

Have you tried to use GitHub integrated VS Code from within the Browser?

To open a GitHub repository directly in VS Code for the Web, simply use URL shortcuts by changing the domain in the repository’s link.

GitHub.dev Shortcut

In your browser, replace github.com with github.dev in the URL of the repository.
For example, change:
https://github.com/owner/repository
to:
https://github.dev/owner/repository
This URL will instantly open the repository in Visual Studio Code for the Web, showing all files and folders in the VS Code interface.

Vscode.dev Shortcut

You can also use the VS Code web editor's direct URL:
https://vscode.dev/github/owner/repository
This works the same way, letting you quickly browse and edit content without downloading anything.

Re: Speeding Up Workloads with Ducks(?!): Case Study of New DuckDB ACCESS Engine

AhmedAl_Attar — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 14:26:22 GMT

@EmmettSmith24
@samiulhaque

I wish SAS V9 R&D team and Product management pay attention to your finding and understand the High Cost constraints/ownership of SAS V9 in the cloud the current SAS users are complaining about!!

IF they could provide/port-back the ability to read/write and process Parquet files like they have done with SAS Viya, running SAS V9 efficiently in the cloud wouldn't be a cost prohibitive as it is today!

Re: Looking to Set Up SAS Web Application Stored Process as a RESTful API for non-SAS Users

AhmedAl_Attar — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 23:34:05 GMT

@LukeW21

Here is an additional resource to look into SAS® 9.4 Stored Processes: Developer’s Guide, Third Edition

Try to access the SAS Stored Process Web Application http://yourserver.com:8080/SASStoredProcess/do , within this web app, there are a list of Stored Process Samples, one of these samples, illustrates how to use multiple output formats "Sample: Multiple Output Formats - Using ODS to generate PDF, PostScript, RTF and other output"
You can use this sample as a guide.

Hope this helps

Re: Libname Options Access to Postgres for SAS9.4M8

AhmedAl_Attar — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:24:36 GMT

@Markus04

Are you sure?
According to the on-line docs https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/9.4_3.5/acreldb/n0sc92audsisvsn1jbd0fx3nealw.htm

SAS/ACCESS Interface to Postgres supports bulk loading!

Re: How to use API password and API key

AhmedAl_Attar — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 02:13:38 GMT

Hi @eramirez

Have a look at these three papers

They should have what you are looking for and more

Re: Upload to Databricks via ODBC is very slow

AhmedAl_Attar — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 18:44:27 GMT

One added information

SAS Help Center: BULKLOAD= LIBNAME Statement Option

Notes:	Support for Microsoft SQL Server, Spark in HDFS, and Yellowbrick was added in SAS 9.4M7.
Notes:	Support for Informix and for Spark in Databricks was added in SAS 9.4M9.

Re: Upload to Databricks via ODBC is very slow

AhmedAl_Attar — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:58:19 GMT

Hi @js5

Have a look at this Databricks Blog

https://www.databricks.com/blog/2022/03/16/how-to-speed-up-data-flow-between-databricks-and-sas.html

Re: How to execute a proc compare in a Kernel Script on a Unix server

AhmedAl_Attar — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:26:58 GMT

If you are generating text files (*.txt), they you would be better off using Linux native tools for comparing these text file, such as
$diff file1 file2

Hope this helps