SAS Maintenace Packs

[thesasuser]

Hello

Can any body please help me understand what  SAS maintenance packs are and how are they different from hot fixes?

[SASKiwi]

This link explains maintenance releases:

http://support.sas.com/software/updates/index.html

and this one hot fixes:

http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/hotfix.html#

The differences should be clear once you have checked these out.

You can access these and a lot of others from support.sas.com under Administrator Resources. I strongly recommend you become familiar with what is available as it will aid your use and understanding of SAS enormously.  

[thesasuser]

Thanks for the quick response and references.

SAS documentation is an excellent reference, comprehensible at times even to the uninitiated. Cross references often overwhelm the reader.

 My question was in reference to the items in the platform admin certification requirements which I could not understand

........

Regularly manage and apply hot fixes

Apply SAS maintenance packs

.........

This create an impression that maintenance packs are something distinct from (container) hot fixes or maintenance releases.

My understanding is that for moving to a higher maintenance release one needs to re install / migrate SAS ( For example moving from 9.4M3 to 9.4M4).

I was wondering what these maintenance packs are and how are they related to hot fixes and maintenance releases.

[JuanS_OCS · Accepted solution]

Hello @thesasuser,

to apply or install a new maintenance is nothing more than a simple upgrade-in-place. Generally speaking, it should be quite straight forward: to update binaries (with SAS Deployment Wizard), and update the configuration (with SAS Deployment Manager, normally triggered automatically by the SDW), so 2 steps. However, the Guide to Updates can help much better with this question, specially since some products and some maintenances might contain specifics.

Regarding your very last question: maintenaces are like mega-containers of the hotfixes released for the previous mantenances and, generally speaking, some new features.

Sometimes, it might even contain new applications, but those new applications would require to update your deployment plan file (plan.xml) with the new components and, after upgrading in place and updating your plan file, you can deploy them with SAS deployment wizard. 

Hope it helps,

Kind regards,

Juan