Watch this Ask the Expert session on promoting content between your SAS® Platforms.

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How Do You Promote Content Between Your SAS^® Platforms? Q&A, Slides, and On-Demand Recording 

Watch this Ask the Expert session on promoting content between your SAS^® Platforms. Perfect for SAS administrators. 

Watch the webinar

Join Kevin Bickford as he discusses the steps for moving content within Viya (promoting content from SAS Viya dev, test to prod) and from SAS 9.4 to Viya using promotion tools. During this webinar you will:

• Review the process of promoting content within SAS Viya and SAS 9.4 to Viya.
• Explore the level of support for SAS Viya resources.
• Review steps to export and import, and the manual steps for promoting content.

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.

Is there a list of the different types of content that can be moved from one Viya instance to another Viya instance?

How is promotion different than migration?

Promotion is when you have an intact environment and you want to move specific reports or content into Viya. For example, you have your SAS 9.4 environment that’s already deployed, and you have some Visual Analytics reports that you want to move to Viya. You would use a promotion tool to move those reports because you’re not moving all your SAS Visual Analytics reports. You do a migration if you’re moving all your content. The migration happens at the time of the install.

Migrate To move a workload from one SAS environment to another. This frequently involves moving to a more recent software version, but can also apply when moving to different hardware, operating systems, cloud infrastructure, or geographic location. The differentiating characteristic is that processing of the workload ceases in the originating environment and resumes in the target environment. In many cases, migration implies deploying a new target environment.

Promote To copy or move user content from one SAS environment to another. Examples of user content are models, reports, views, library definitions, formats, authorization settings, and data plans. You can selectively choose a subset of content to promote, allowing for incremental movement from one environment to another. In many cases, promotion implies that your target environment is already deployed and operational.

Can you selectively choose a subset of content to promote?

Any supported objects that the folder contains (including reports, comments, files, and subfolders) are automatically included in the promotion. You can also select one or more objects within the folder to promote (for example, a report).

If I export a python code file, is the text stored in the json or is it encoded?

It is stored in the json file.

Here is how to export python to SAS Viya The SAS Scripting Wrapper for Analytics Transfer (SWAT) is a package developed by SAS to allow the Python interface to access the SAS Viya platform. https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2019/3610-2019.pdf

Is it possible to change the directory where you store the report you are importing?

Yes. To change the table mappings: select different target servers, CASLIBs, and tables; use an existing mapping file; or select different target servers, CASLIBs, and tables, and use an existing mapping file. If you are importing an .spk file that contains substitution properties, change substitution property mappings if needed. Note: If you are using an existing mapping file as well as making changes to the existing mappings, then you must choose the existing mapping file first. If you choose the existing mapping file after you make changes to the existing mappings, the changes to the existing mappings are erased.

If I have projects I developed in Enterprise Miner, can those projects be exported from Enterprise Miner and imported to SAS Viya?

No, but the resulting score code data set can be promoted to Viya, here is a paper

SAS® Enterprise Miner™ and SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning Hand Shake

https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2019/3616-2019.pdf

I have a question on the ACT promotion: If deny is discarded through promotion, how do you limit users/groups on Viya?

The SAS Viya approach to authorization is very different from the SAS 9 approach. For that reason, promotion cannot fully replicate your SAS 9 authorizations in SAS Viya. See “Comparison to SAS 9 Authorization” in SAS Viya Administration: Orientation to Authorization. http://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=calauthz&docsetVersion=3.4&docsetTarget=p0g0vol9j5o4t0n1381yo...  Important: Promotion does not process access control templates (ACTs). If you deconstruct ACTs into individual access control entries (ACEs) before promotion, promotion can process the individual ACEs that are directly set on each promoted object.

Is the SAS Content Assessment Utility tool difficult and time consuming to use? We have a SAS Grid environment.

It’s not difficult to use, but you must run it on each server where SAS is deployed. Traditionally with Grid you have a number of different servers, so you’d need to run it on each one to create the assessment.

Recommended Resources

SAS Viya 3.5 Administration: Promotion

Migrating from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya 3.5

SAS Hackathon

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