SAS Viya Trial -- Not Working? Or Am I Missing Something?

[jimbarbour]

I signed up for a SAS Viya Trial.  

I tried running one of their sample blocks of code from a Jupyter notebook:

option casport=5570 cashost="localhost";
cas casauto;
caslib _all_ assign;

I got the following message:

SAS Connection failed. No connection established. Double check you settings in sascfg.py file.

Attempted to run program /opt/sas/viya/home/SASFoundation/bin/sas_u8 with the following parameters:['/opt/sas/viya/home/SASFoundation/bin/sas_u8', '-nodms', '-stdio', '-terminal', '-nosyntaxcheck', '-pagesize', 'MAX', '']

Try running the following command (where saspy is running) manually to see if you can get more information on what went wrong:
/opt/sas/viya/home/SASFoundation/bin/sas_u8 -nodms -stdio -terminal -nosyntaxcheck -pagesize MAX  

No SAS process attached. SAS process has terminated unexpectedly.
No SAS process attached. SAS process has terminated unexpectedly.
No SAS process attached. SAS process has terminated unexpectedly.
No SAS process attached. SAS process has terminated unexpectedly.
No SAS process attached. SAS process has terminated unexpectedly. 
Restarting SAS session on your behalf
in shutdown function
Restarting kernel...
Done!
'No SAS process attached. SAS process has terminated unexpectedly.'

Does that mean that the trial environment is down?  Or do I need to do something different?

The "Running" tab lists the particular Notebook associated with the above code and message and says "SAS" by it.  Presumably the little "SAS" designator means that I can run SAS code.

Has anyone any insight here?   I'm a complete noob to Jupyter Notebooks and Viya.  (I wish that they had a SAS Studio interface for the Viya trial. Learning a new version of SAS and a completely unfamiliar interface is a bit much all at once).

Thanks,

Jim

[QuangTran]

Hi,

Email sas.viyaep@sas.com for help.

Rgs,

Quang.

[jimbarbour]

OK, thanks @QuangTran.

Ironically, Python seems to be working.  

Jim

[sastpw]

@jimbarbour, I've just see this post and I'm trying to investigate.I'm not familiar with this, so I don't know what for sure what's in this trial. Poking around I found this, I'm assuming this is what you were trying?

https://www.sas.com/en_us/trials.html

And I suppose the one labeled Open Source Programmer?

I'm in the process of tracking down the folks who set this up so I can get into the system they are running to see why this isn't working.

The following is a bit of a guess, since I can't see what's here, but it's an educated guess FWTW 🙂

I believe that the jupyter interface you're using for this notebook is the SAS_kernel, which means, yes, it's SAS code that you submit in those cells. Jupyter has different 'kernels', which is just language interpreters for a given notebook. Notebooks are all the same; cells you type code into which then display results following that code, inline. This notebook is running the SAS_kernel, so it's SAS code you submit.

I see nothing wrong with what you're trying, it appears something is not correct in the installed code or configuration or something like that with the image you've been provided.

I'll try to get access to the underlying image and diagnose the problem. I assume I can reproduce it, as these are probably all identical images of code and configuration that each user gets for the trial. But again, I don't really know how this is all set up - yet 🙂

Also, can you show me what python code you're running that you mentioned was working? Were you able to do 'SAS' work via the Python kernel in a notebook, or was it just 'native' python code that was working?

Thanks, and I'll let you know what I find!

Tom

[sastpw]

Ok, so I was able to at least connect to one of these myself, using a personal email (employees can't get at it w/ our credentials).

It appears that you're not missing anything, but we are. the saspy that's installed in this system isn't configured right. The SAS_kernel in jupyter uses saspy under the covers to submit the code and get the results. In the python kernel of jupyter you can run saspy directly; which get's the same error, of course, as that is the saspy error from the SAS notebook too.

I've gotten up with our folks internally who support this and we will fix it. I will let you know when this is resolved.

Sorry about that, but I imagine they were trying out the python swat (talks to CAS) on this deployment and not saspy. But whatever the mix up, we'll address it!

Thanks!

Tom

[sastpw · Accepted solution]

@jimbarbour. This has been fixed, over the weekend; they redeployed and reconfigured saspy for these systems. I've just gotten a new reservation and I was able to verify that this is now working correctly. Both saspy and SAS_kernel connect and function properly. So, give it a try again and things should work as expected!

Sorry for that not being correct and verified originally.

Tom

[jimbarbour]

Tom,

Thanks so much for checking into this and getting the error corrected.  I had even mentioned the error to some of the SAS folks at WUSS about a month and a half ago, but I think they may have been pretty busy with the conference at the time.  At the conference, Viya was essentially pitched as the future of SAS, so I was particularly interested in trying it.

I've got a couple of deadlines to meet this week, but hopefully I can re-activate my trial and give it a shot over the weekend.

Thank you again,

Jim