can I download the files used in the course?

[forthdram]

I would like to download the files for the data science courses and run the projects on our system

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:

  All of the course material has been modified to refer to locations on the SAS Virtual Lab. However, that is not the main issue. The main issue with your approach is that we can't just provide a zip archive of program files for the courses.The setup for the SAS Academy for Data Science classes is more complex than Programming 1 or Programming 2, where we just send you 1 program to make the data and you're good to go.

  You'd have to have ALL of the software: Visual Analytics, DataFlux, SAS Access for Hadoop, Enterprise Miner, Text Miner, Visual Statistics, etc. And then, you'd not only have to have ALL of the software, but the configuration would have to be the same as our configuration or none of the instructions would work without "translating" from our names to the names you used. You'd have to use the SAME server names, SAME users and groups, SAME passwords and credentials, SAME libnames and metadata for ALL the files used in the 18 classes. You'd have to set up all the server and spawner connection scripts.

  To do all of these things, you would need administrative access and the ability to do this amount of configuration on your system AND, you'd have to do all of this before you started any of the courses. Each of the modules in the SAS Academy for Data Science package has a separate image, with separate server configurations. The Big Data image for Hadoop is a 4 server image.

  As you might imagine, this is not a trivial amount of work. Although a few of our courses are standalone courses like Statistics 1, more of them require data or image setup that is outside the scope of the SAS Academy classes and would require administrator privileges to implement on your system.

  One benefit of the Virtual Lab is that if you should mess up or accidentally delete a file that breaks something, you can always make a new reservation for a fresh image and essentially start over with a fresh image. That is a great benefit of the Virtual Lab.

  If you tried to replicate our 5 images at your site and something broke at your site, then, you'd need to start over from the installation/configuration step and take time away from your Data Science studies to rebuild the image that broke.

  This is why we have preloaded all the data and all the software on the Virtual Lab and given you enough Virtual Lab time (100 hours for Big Data modules and 100 hours for Advanced Analytics modules) to do all the work.

  I hope this explains why we don't have just "data files" for download with the Academy.

Cynthia