Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn how Viya Workbench provides users the flexibility to build from scratch or streamline work by pulling in existing Python or SAS projects – with minimal to no code modification needed.
You will learn how to use the Interactive Modeling node in SAS Visual Forecasting to:
The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.
Q&A
What is your favorite way to write SAS Code? SAS Studio? EG? Other?
Joe Madden: VS Code is becoming the popular choice internally. Joseph Henry gets credit for getting me to switch over. I prefer Jupyter before I started using Workbench. We want to hear if there are more IDs that people prefer. Someone asked us about Spider. Although, it was one customer who asked about it. But, like Joseph shared earlier, we want customer feedback on these things because there are always so many different developer preferences. It's really helpful to hear the direct feedback. We'd love to know if there are more developer environments that we should be considering.
Joseph Henry: One thing I will say, I've worked at SAS for 12 years now and I've used SAS DMS exclusively for the majority of that time. Every day when I was debugging a proc, I just use Display Manager. This was also during the time of EG SAS Studio, but Display Manager always worked. It was quick and simple. Since we made Workbench, I haven't used it because it's easy and quick. I have always been the type of person who uses the easiest thing available to me.
Is Viya Workbench available for students?
A student would be able to go out and request a license, but I think the more likely outcome is a “stay tuned for the future.” For us, we do want to have a more full-on SaaS type of offering, where you just go to the website, and you can start using Workbench directly. Our first iteration of Workbench here is for customers who need to protect their data first and foremost, and then who are currently running on AWS, we will unlock Azure. We're looking for some time next year to be able to introduce an Azure private tenant type of very similar offering. But we're supporting our current customers first and foremost. We believe that the same Workbench experience is flexible. We're going to hopefully bring this to the Hackathon this fall, so you'd be able to try it out there and there'll be a lot more opportunities for education.
This has been the theme all along. How do we make this easier for students in the classroom to try to start using Workbench? So, we have not forgotten about you. Hopefully, as you're still a student, you'll be able to see this come out soon.
Education is 100% on the radar, but if you focus on too many things at one time, then nothing really gets done properly. So, we're focusing on our main release and once we get that done, then partnering with universities to bring this to students. We want to make sure students can fire things up. And I'd say if you're a PhD student who needs to lock down your data, reach out to us, we'd love to talk to you about that use case. Think in the near term, this architecture might be a good kind of friendly option for those really sensitive projects.
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Thanks Joe and Joseph. I haven't even watched the ATE yet, but just reading these answers, there is SO much that excites me about Workbench, as a user.
I'm glad that the idea of Workbench as full SaaS is at least in the heads of you and others at SAS. I think that would be a tremendous offering.
Also agree that there will be great value in extending Workbench to students. I would love to one day see Workbench for Learners, ideally like SAS OnDemand for Academics where a version is available to both students enrolled in an academic program and independent learners.
And finally, it's really good to know that Workbench was built by developers like Joseph with more than a decade of PC SAS / Display Manager experience. When I've trialed Workbench, it really does feel like good ol' SAS programming as many of us have known it, for decades. Thanks for all the work to make Workbench into a reality. And congrats on the launch!
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