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CAS is Fast

Started ‎09-18-2020 by
Modified ‎02-28-2020 by
Views 6,479

Some people need time to warm-up to new things. As a member of the Global Enablement and Learning team, I see this every day. While "late adopters" are generally quite willing to learn the latest twist or tweak on something they already know well, they balk at the truly novel and complete paradigm shifts. Such it is with CAS. Many SAS users are taking a "long" approach.

 

One group that might be reluctant to adopt CAS is surprisingly SAS' most ardent supporters. These users have invested lots of time into their SAS knowledge. With so much invested, they can be reluctant to work in another construct where they aren't so confident or skilled.

 

So, for you SAS true believers, let's look at how to get the best performance in CAS and compare it to SAS (standard disclaimers about these tests being done on non-optimal, virtual hardware...) and, hopefully, once you know how to get vastly better performance from CAS than single engine (but still awesome!) base SAS, you'll be more comfortable giving it a try.

1. Group BY Aggregation -- Low Cardinality

When choosing data processing techniques in base SAS, you usually only have DATA Step or PROCs. You have these in CAS as well, but, when looking for optimum performance, the best place to start is with the CAS Actions, and aggregation is no exception.

 

Thanks to Nicolas Robert, we already know which CAS action aggregates the fastest (at least in his scenario), simple.summary. So, let's compare its performance on some big data against base SAS on the same.

Test Parameters

Test Parameter Value
Input Rows 160 million
Distinct BY Groups (Cardinality) 8

CAS Code -- Simple.Summary

proc cas ;
   simple.summary result=r status=s /
      inputs={"revenue","expenses"},
      subSet={"SUM"},
      table={
         name="mega_corp"
         caslib="visual"
         groupBy={"facilityType","productline"}
      },
      casout={name="summaryMC", replace=True, replication=0} ;
quit ;

Base SAS Code -- PROC MEANS

proc means data=mega_corp noprint;
   var revenue expenses;
   class facilityType productline;
   output out=summaryMC sum(revenue)=sumRevenue sum(expenses)=sumExpenses;
run;

Results

Engine Method Real Time
CAS Simple.Summary 7.39
SAS PROC MEANS 2:32.44

2. Group BY Aggregation -- High Cardinality

There has been some talk that CAS does not perform well with high cardinality operations. Let's take a look by increasing the number of BY-Groups. We'll use the same code as above but replace the GroupBy and CLASS variables with productID, date, and unit. This gives us approximately 88,000 distinct groups.

Test Parameters

Test Parameter Value
Input Rows 160 million
Distinct BY Groups (Cardinality) 88,000

Results

Engine Method Real Time
CAS Simple.Summary 18.22
SAS PROC MEANS 2:31.65

3. De-Duplication

As with aggregation, picking the right technique is key and, thankfully again, Nicolas Robert has already shown us which method to use for de-duplication, the simple.GroupBy CAS action.

 

So, let's compare simple.GroupBy with PROC SORT.

Test Parameters

Test Parameter Value
Input Rows 160 million
Unique Keys 88,000

CAS Code -- Simple.GroupBy

proc cas;
   simple.groupBy result=r status=rc /
      inputs={"productID", "date", "unit"}
      table={caslib="casuser",name="mega_corp"}
      casOut={name="dedupMC",replace=true,replication=0} ;
run ;
quit ;

Base SAS Code -- PROC SORT

proc sort data=mega_corp nodupkey out=dedupMC;
   by productID date unit;
run;

Results

Engine Method Real Time
CAS Simple.GroupBy 12.57
SAS PROC SORT 3:09.29

Discussion

So, there you have it. CAS is fast. It is plowing through some decent sized data here on a few (5), relatively small (4-way) virtual servers in seconds.

 

If you want performance like this however, you need to know which techniques to use. Luckily some of the hard work has already been done for you. In particular check out these posts:

You'll also need to know more about CAS Actions. In particular, you'll need to know how to enhance them so they do exactly what you want. This post should help with that:

Comments

You're absolutely right, many are reluctant to adopt cas language.

first I was confused and even thought about giving up.

now I LOVE cas actions, they are so efficient!

Thanks! I like it too. You can also spice up your CAS actions with computed columns, https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/CAS-Action-Computed-Columns/ta-p/563312, and combine CAS action logic with the CASL programming language, https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2019/06/25/cas-stored-process-runcasl/
Version history
Last update:
‎02-28-2020 12:58 PM
Updated by:
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