We have SAS 9.4 and Viya Clusters --- What is the best way to Guide users which to use?

[jcz]

Here is a general question that I hope your answers will help me guide our 1000+ users.

Abut 10-20% of our users are hard core SAS Programmers, and the rest are the consumers of the Reports, Info Portal Apps and other work done by the SAS Programmers.

Some of the work load involves large data sets with complex joins across multiple Data Bases of multiple types.  Some involves just producing and distributing regular aggregation reports...   

We have built and deployed a Viya Cluster along side of our 9.4 Cluster and I need to write up some guidance on what sort of work should be transferred to Viya, and what sort best stays on the 9.4 Cluster....

I have many years of SAS experience, but new to Viya, and though I have some ideas of how to answer this, I am reaching out to the community in hopes that I may find better insight into the question or how to describe the benefit to our user community.

[Anand_V]

Hi @jcz 

I think its a very good question and I would wait for other experts to answer on this.

My two cents here:

First thing should be to analyse the current SAS 9 codes and verify if they are supported to run on Viya or not.

Not all SAS Procs running on SAS 9 are supported on SAS Viya.

https://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=whatsdiff&docsetTarget=n0m306a3p9spz7n1ew3j9scjiqjf.htm&d...

The CAS language is very similar to the SAS language. Some procedures are available on both platforms, so some existing SAS code can be run on the SAS Viya platform. However, SAS Viya also contains new procedures that take advantage of the open, distributed environment. As a result, some SAS 9 procedures do not exist in the new SAS Viya environment.

Secondly If workloads are running within few mins then its fine to keep running them on SAS9. For workloads running for hours with lots of data and number crunching or new requirements for machine learning, data mining should be a good case to on-board on Viya platform to leverage the In-memory capabilities of CAS engine.

[nhvdwalt]

Hi @jcz 

This is quite a broad question and also very circumstantial.

I would suggest that you get in contact with your local SAS Customer Advisory team through your account executive to guide you based on your organizational needs.

[SASKiwi]

@jcz - This is a topic of great interest to me too as we decide if it is worthwhile adding Viya to our SAS 9 infrastructure. From what I can gather, SAS 9 will remain the default choice for existing applications simply for compatibility reasons. With new applications Viya becomes an option to explore and understand the advantages of a new architecture.