SAS Viya: Working with APIs

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Did you miss the Ask the Expert session on SAS® Viya™: Working with APIs? No problem! You can click below to catch it on demand.

Watch the webinar

This session is for both experienced and novice SAS® users who want to learn how and when to use APIs to run machine learning models in SAS® Viya™.

Here are some highlighted questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the session for ease of reference.

Does SAS® Viya™ come with Model Studio or is that an additional purchase?

SAS® Viya™ is the newest technology from SAS® that provides our latest in-memory, multi-threaded, and distributed analytics engine, a re-architected mid-tier based on microservices, and HTML5 user-interfaces. Multiple products can be licensed that run on SAS® Viya. Examples of these are SAS® Visual Analytics, SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, and SAS® Model Manager, among others. SAS® Viya™ also comes with different web applications either as a platform services (such as Environment Manager or Data Studio) or with specific products (such as Model Studio). Model Studio comes with the following any of the following licenses: SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, SAS® Visual Forecasting, or SAS® Visual Text Analytics (note: these products can be purchased individually or together in one order and Model Studio comes with any combination thereof).

What products do I need to order to get these different APIs?

The CAS APIs come with the base SAS® product for most Viya™ solutions: SAS® Visual Analytics. Being able to run more advanced algorithms is tiered on top of that with other products such as SAS® Visual Statistics and SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning. Providing SAS® jobs through the SAS® Job Execution Web Application is a Viya™ platform service, so the base SAS® Viya™ product of SAS® Visual Analytics is the minimum required product for that API. Being able to run models in real-time using the Micro Analytic Service requires a SAS® Model Manager or SAS® Decision Manager license which can be added onto any SAS® Viya™ order. The Model Studio scoring API comes with Model Studio which comes with SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, SAS® Visual Forecasting, or SAS® Visual Text Analytics.

I heard you can score machine learning model in real-time in SAS® Event Stream Processing. Does SAS® Event Stream Processing have APIs as well?

Yes! You can score machine learning models in real-time using SAS® Event Stream Processing. SAS® Model Manager and SAS® Decision Manager also provide a real-time model scoring engine (the Micro Analytic Service). This webinar covers the Micro Analytic Service, but you can find browse other Ask the Expert webinars for information about SAS® Event Stream Processing. To put it simply, SAS® Event Stream Processing is best when you may be interested in stateful computations across multiple events (such as real-time aggregations, unions, joins, or pattern matching) in addition to real-time model scoring. Or if you want to connect to streaming data sources like Apache Kafka or IoT-specific protocols. But if all you need is to call a REST API to score a transaction against a model the Micro Analytic Service should be sufficient for you.

Are there APIs for other SAS® products like SAS® Visual Analytics and SAS® Data Preparation in Viya™?

Yes! You can find the complete list of APIs at developer.sas.com.

Are there similar APIs available for SAS® 9 products?

Generally, yes, and I’d advise you to consult the documentation for respective SAS® 9 products to learn more about APIs for SAS® 9.

Is there a CLI (Command Line Interface) option for SAS® Viya™?

Yes, there are a CLI-like tools for SAS® Viya™. There is the official CLI which allows you to perform administrative tasks (such as exporting, importing, transferring, and promoting content). There are also a couple Python packages we’ve released on github.com/sassoftware that help with scripting some of the APIs. Of note are the python-swat package and the pyviyatools packages.

Recommended Resources

developer.sas.com

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[Kyle4]

Hi Tyler,

Thanks for the lesson - very informative. Is there a way to score many records at once via the API in MAS. If we feed in an array, with multiple records, we only get the response for the last record.

Kind Regards,

Kyle