Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn about the extended visualization capabilities in SAS® Viya® to create visualizations in a low code/no code manner and how you can share them via different channels.
Watch the webinar
You will:
- Get an overview on SAS Visual Analytics visualization objects.
- Compare visualizations of SAS®9 and SAS Viya in a live demo.
- Understand which skills are needed to create visualizations using the low code/no code approach of Viya.
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
Can you comment on the efforts to move to Viya? We have many reports built in SAS 9. Will we have to rebuild all those in Viya?
Particularly for SAS 9, there is the SAS 9 Content Assessment Tool, which is a collection of applications designed to examine the characteristics of your SAS 9 system. Each application examines your SAS 9 system for relevant information, gathers key details, and produces results from each part of the assessment that can be analyzed in a report. This tool is extremely important for the migration planning and prioritization.
Artifacts such as OLAP Cubes, Information Maps, Stored Processes, etc. can be moved from SAS 9 to SAS Viya via promotion (export package from SAS 9 and import it in SAS Viya).
Because SAS 9 and SAS Viya are designed to solve business problems in different ways, there are feature differences. Even similar features available on both platforms may work differently. As a result, migration should be thoughtful to ensure the technology available addresses business needs expectedly. Some examples of those differences were given in the beginning of this webinar in the slide that mapped SAS 9 Web Report Studio, BI Dashboard, and Information Delivery Portal to equivalent technologies in SAS Viya.
Also, not every artifact can be promoted. Particularly for SAS 9 BI / Visualization, there are non-supported artifacts that would need to be recreated as equivalent artifacts in SAS Viya to ensure the business needs are addressed, as mentioned before, and the use of SAS 9 Content Assessment Tool plays an important role to help identify those artifacts, their usage, and plan accordingly.
We saw some examples today, but are there any other advantages of SAS Viya over SAS 9?
SAS Viya is based on containerized microservices. This is the foundation of what it means to be cloud native. This advantage lets you…
- Run on most major public, private, or hybrid clouds – like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and RedHat OpenShift. As a benefit, you can think about balance of cost and agility, as well as support for multi-cloud strategies
- This is also the basis of software as a service solutions from SAS, so we are able to deliver these capabilities with the turn of a key to our customers who’d like us to manage everything for them.
We’ve evolved our pricing and packaging to be more aligned to cloud architectures. The benefit is subscription-based pricing that is simple and predictable
SAS Viya is also automated. CI/CD allows for continuous updates, so you get the latest features in a much shorter time span, with reduced downtime. No migration or hotfixes… just updates!
And just to be brief on a topic that could unfold in a very interesting discussion we can mention other benefits like:
- Scalable Speed and High Availability – inherited from cloud architecture
- Modern and integrated low/no-code GUIs and programming interfaces – allowing people with different skills or level of expertise and from different silos to collaborate on the same problems, and the same data
- Support for Open Source in addition to SAS – allowing people to work in their preferred programming language to take advantage of all the analytic talent the market has to offer
How would report wide filter controls be set up? I can set them up per page, but I would like to simplify it a bit more.
In Visual Analytics, you can set filter controls at three different levels:
- Canvas - prompt controls are associated with individual objects (visualizations or other controls) as needed
- Page - prompt controls filter all objects on the page
- Report - prompt controls filter the entire report (all objects from all pages)
Page and Report prompt areas are collapsed by default, but you can expand (or toggle) them by going to the Page and Report menus respectively. The Page menu is reachable from the three dots on the right of a page name, and the Report menu is found on the three dots at the top right of the screen.
How does SAS Viya 3.5 work with Microsoft 365? Can you sample it?
SAS Viya 3.5 does not work with SAS for Microsoft 365, but it does work with SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. Currently SAS for Microsoft 365 has support for Excel and Outlook, but support for other applications such as PowerPoint and Word are on the roadmap.
I currently write a lot of reports in SAS 9 and use ODS reporting. How will that work in Viya?
You can still run your code in SAS Viya Compute Server and create ODS output. If you want to execute the code and embed the ODS output in Visual Analytics, you can save your code as a SAS Job and use the Job Content object to point to the job. As always, you can save the ODS output in a location that can be referenced via URL and visualize the content in Visual Analytics via Web Content object.
Do reports have the flexibility to be embedded on webpages or SharePoint pages as a way to better enable access to the reports and visuals?
Yes, that is something that has improved a lot with regards to sharing and collaboration that Renato briefly touched on. It's part of our Visual Analytics Software Development Kit (SDK): https://developer.sas.com/guides/visual-analytics-sdk.html . Our R&D department has put a lot of resources into that to make it very easy. You can simply copy the SDK snippet that is provided to you from Visual Analytics and paste it into an external webpage. You can embed an entire report, a single page, or just individual visualizations. The content can be interactive or static (your decision).
Can permissions to certain report pages be customized to certain individuals? For example, if I wanted my entire team to see only one of the pages in a report but I wanted the managers to see additional pages, can this be done?
It is on the list of requirements, but the implementation timeframe has not yet been planned. Currently, access is controlled at the report and data levels.
In OLAP, we had the ability to build Row-Level conditions based on Hierarchy levels and assign/attach these Row-Level conditions to our OLAP reports. Does that exist for SAS VA on Viya?
Yes, you can do similar things in VA on Viya. Row-level security is available.
Is there an equivalent to ODS Trace to see what all the available output objects are?
If you are coding, this is still available in the Compute Server, but VA is a no code environment that shows options directly in the interface.
How did you get the Product Name under columns as your grouping variable?
Classification variables are automatically used as group by variables. You can change that behavior in the Options tab on the right.
Did the order that you choose actually impact the table column order? Can you change it?
Yes, you can change it later if needed, either in the Roles pane on the right, or dragging the columns directly in the visualization.
What does OOTB stand for?
Out-of-the-box (no customizations required)
This is all new to me, so a simple question: Is SAS Viya synonymous with SAS Visual Analytics?
No. SAS Visual Analytics is the main visualization tool in the SAS Viya ecosystem. Because this webinar is about visualization, many times we said SAS Viya we were implicitly referring to SAS Visual Analytics.
How can I prepare a real-time dashboard on SAS VIYA (3.5, 4.5)? For example, I have some key values on my dashboard on SAS Viya and I want to change these numbers when the new data comes. 🙂
You can use Gauge Objects in Visual Analytics for your dashboard, and whenever the data is refreshed in memory, the auto-refresh ability of VA will display the latest values in the dashboard. Refreshing the in-memory tables can be accomplished with streaming solutions from SAS, like Event Stream Processing, or batch jobs.
Is SAS 9 going to be replaced by SAS Viya in the future?
SAS Viya is the future, so new enhancements will be planned for SAS Viya, but rest assured that SAS 9 is not going away that soon.
How do we make SAS Viya available for college students?
Yes! Please, look at https://www.sas.com/en_us/software/on-demand-for-academics.html
Just paid for SAS Viya, what is the recommended Installation Guide to work with our current infrastructure of Oracle APEX/Cloud?
SAS Viya deployment documentation can be found here (just make sure you select the correct version on the top left of the page): https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/itopscdc/v_026/dplyml0phy0dkr/titlepage.htm
I'm not familiar with Oracle APEX, but after a quick investigation on Google, it seems that it is an application development platform with "world-class features". If those features include industry standard API calls and support for SDK (in case those are Web-based applications), then you could certainly leverage those to integrate with SAS Viya.
Does Viya run in SAS Foundation Services?
SAS Viya contains two runtime environments: CAS and Compute Server. Compute Server can execute SAS code and provides equivalent capabilities found in SAS 9 Foundation Services.
Can users download the source data behind the report?
Yes, they can. An administrator can control that capability if it is not desired.
Can Viya reports be embedded in a website? If so, how?
Yeah, that is something that has improved a lot with regards to access that Reynaldo briefly touched on. It's part of our Visual Analytics Software Development Kit (SDK): https://developer.sas.com/guides/visual-analytics-sdk.html . Our R&D department has put a lot of resources into that to make it very easy. You can simply copy something from Visual Analytics and paste it into an external webpage. That report object, for example, will be displayed where you have placed it in your external webpage. It's quite easy to do, and much better than what it was in SAS 9 I would say because the iframe solution was not ideal.
How can I refresh my data with SAS Event Stream process?
SAS Event Stream Processing is a solution that takes data captured on the edge, applies transformations on the data such as aggregations, data quality, and analytics for real time intelligence decisions. The data can be streamed into in-memory tables that are consumed in a VA report and if you set the refresh rate, which can go down to once per second, at the report, page, or object level, you can force VA to query the data and refresh the visualizations at regular intervals, if that is what you want.
Recommended Resources
Beautiful Reports with SAS Visual Analytics
Explore, Share, Tell the Story With SAS® Visual Analytics
SAS® Visual Analytics SDK: Embed SAS Visual Analytics Insights in Your Web Pages and Web Apps
Smarter and Faster with SAS® Visual Analytics
Modernize your SAS® Visual Analytics Environment
Tips and Techniques for Designing the Perfect Layout with SAS® Visual Analytics
Tips for Building Rich Interaction in Your SAS® Visual Analytics Reports
SUGA Live - Virtual Event for SAS Administrators and Architects
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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