Connecting SAS 9.4 on UNIX AIX to Azure HDInsight Cluster

[TBarker]

Has anyone here successfully connected SAS 9.4 on UNIX AIX to an Azure HDInsight cluster? On UNIX, the default HTTPS port is 8343. The Azure HDI default port is 443. Port 443 is not typically used by SAS 9.4 on UNIX machines, as the lower ports on UNIX are restricted for use by ROOT only. We are wondering if anyone has successfully made a connection with this same type of configuration and can provide some guidance on how you made it work. We have an open ticket with SAS Tech Support, but that back-and-forth usually takes a while and UNIX support is not a SAS strength (not a complaint about tech support, just an observation after years of working with SAS - SAS TS is much more knowledgeable about LINUX and Windows configurations). If a SAS admin has successfully made this connection and can provide the steps taken to make it happen, that would be very helpful. Thanks.

[JBailey]

Hi,

It has been a while (I retired from SAS) so things may have changed (I doubt it), SAS doesn't support connecting to Hadoop (using SAS/ACCESS to Hadoop) from AIX. The problem is that the Hadoop community doesn't support AIX. So, there was no way for SAS to suppport it. 

Make sure to ask this specific question: Is SAS/ACCESS Interface to Hadoop supported on AIX?

Best wishes,
Jeff

[TBarker]

Jeff, thank you for your response. Yes, I guess it's been a while for you, as we do have a working SAS on AIX connection to an on-prem Hadoop cluster, which we established in 2018. We are looking to change from on-prem Hadoop to Azure HDI and need to make the connection between our on-prem SAS 9.4 environment and the Azure HDI cloud environment. We may have made some progress on this on Friday. I'll know more next week after some more testing and will update this thread with the resolution, if so.
Thanks again for your response. I appreciate your time.

[JBailey]

Hi,

I did find this in the doc: https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/9.4_3.5/acreldb/n103yhji21l0c8n1iuto084a72q5.htm

Good luck.

Best wishes,
Jeff

[TBarker]

Update 2/21/23: It appears to be a SAS Private JRE versioning issue, as we can connect and read the HDI data directly from the AIX server (NOT via SAS) using standard Java SE 8. We're working with SAS to update our JRE version to a newer one that more closely matches the OS Java version. I'll post another update once that's complete and tested (it may be a while; this is a slow-moving process).