A first look at Migration from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya

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As I noted in my previous article SAS Viya is the future of SAS, as a result making it easy to get to SAS Viya (2020.1 and later) is critical. In my last article, I looked at getting from SAS Viya 3.x to the new SAS Viya. In this article, I will review at a high-level new features available in this release to make it easier to migrate from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya.

Content Assessment

SAS 9 Content Assessment is a collection of applications designed to help you understand various characteristics of your SAS 9.4 system. The utility is intended to help customers plan for a transition to SAS Viya. Although SAS 9 Content Assessment has been around for a while now, development work is ongoing, and the included tools continue to improve. The applications that will help with content migration from SAS 9.4 are:

inventoryContent: counts the various SAS artifacts and content on your system.
profileContent: profiles specific SAS artifacts and content on your system. Profile takes a deeper look at the attributes of content.
codeCheck: evaluates SAS code for compatibility with SAS Viya and CAS.

In addition, Content Assessment has added a few "helper" applications.

importEGProjects: imports multiple SAS Enterprise Guide projects on the file system to SAS Viya 4
importPackages: imports multiple .spk files projects on the file system to SAS Viya 4.

Note: a fourth application SystemEvaluation helps with Upgrading within SAS 9.4 These applications are an important part of the planning process for those embarking on the journey from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya. I will not focus on content assessment here as there are lots of existing resources :

This article will focus on what new 9.4 objects are supported by the content migration tools and the new interface in SAS Viya.

SAS 9.4 Supported Content

With the new release of SAS, Viya support has been added for many more SAS 9.4 objects. The tables below cover the current situation. They list the SAS 9.4 content, the level of support, and what happens to the 9.4 content when it is migrated for use in SAS Viya.

Before we look at the table let’s look at how the migration of objects works in a general sense. SAS 9.4 objects that include process flows, like Enterprise Guide Projects and Data Integration Studio Flows are usually migrated to SAS Studio Flows in Viya.

It is also common for SAS 9 EBI and DI objects to be migrated into a Job in SAS Viya and/or a Visual Analytic Data View. In general, for objects that require:

Joins and filtering a SAS Viya Job Definition and possibly Job Requests are created
Calculations, hierarchies, and aggregations usually SAS Visual Analytics Data Views are created

In a previous article, I covered what the various job objects are, if you are interested in the details that article is here. Two of the main objects we see created are Job Definitions and Job Requests.

Job definitions contain metadata about a job including the code, the type of job, any parameters and/or prompts
Job requests added runtime information to a job definition. Job requests make job definitions available for execution and scheduling. Visual Analytics Data Views is a reusable and shareable template for a data source.

Other types of objects we see are Visual Analytics Data Views, Data Plans, SAS Studio Flows, and SAS Studio Queries.

Platform Objects

In terms of platform objects, the major change in the new release is the support of database libraries to database Caslib's. Support has been added for most database libraries, the full list of supported libraries is in the SAS Viya Administration documentation.

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Visual Analytics Objects

The table below covers Visual Analytics objects. A lot of this functionality has been available in SAS Viya for a while and was covered in this previous article.

In SAS Viya 3.5 only the Visual Data Builder append query was supported. In the latest release support is added for the VDB SQL and Star Schema queries. Like the Append Query, on import, the Star Schema query is converted into a SAS Data Studio Data Plan. The SQL query is converted into a SAS Viya SAS Studio query which includes code that creates a CAS Table.

Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Data Integration Objects

It is in the area of Analytic, Business Intelligence, and Data Integration content where most changes have taken place. Preliminary support for stored processes was added in SAS Viya 3.5 and I covered the details in this article.

In SAS Viya, the import of two types of OLAP Cube is supported. Detailed Data Cubes are converted to a Visual Analytics Data View which is connected to a CAS table. The Data View contains the hierarchies, levels, measures, calculated items, etc. The data must be migrated and made available to CAS separately.

Star Schema Cubes are converted to a Job definition which contains the generated FedSQL code to create an output table and a Data View associated with the table. The Data View contains the hierarchies, levels, measures, calculated items, etc. A simple conversion of relation Information Maps is supported resulting in:

Job definition, containing the code to create the target table using PROC SQL code and load it to CAS
Job request, which wraps around the job definition so that it can be submitted and scheduled.

Recent development work has added support for Data Integration Studio Jobs and Enterprise Guide Projects. They are both migrated to SAS Studio Flows. For more details on Enterprise Guide Projects check out this post

New Import User Interface

The latest release of SAS Viya includes an updated interface for importing content with some great new features. The import interface is available as a choice in Environment Manager, it has two tabs, one to import content and one to manage mapping sets. We can't go through all of the new features here but some highlights are:

A mapping set management interface (more on this below)
The capability to selectively import content from a package
The capability to relocate content during an import

New functionality allows mappings to be managed within the import area in SAS Environment Manager. Mappings are now stored within the Infrastructure Data Server as mapping sets, removing the necessity to manually edit json or yaml mapping files within a text editor. Mapping Sets can be managed separately from the import process. They can be:

Loaded and Saved from/to the Infrastructure Data Server
Uploaded from a JSON File
Edited
Merged
Deleted

Summary

Migration from 9.4 to SAS Viya is an area that is very important to SAS in the coming year, Development work is ongoing and support for the migration of additional 9.4 content is being added on a monthly basis.

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.