Check out a few of my favorite things about SAS Viya Workbench!
The purpose of this post is to consolidate information available on SAS Viya Workbench in one handy location. First off, what is it?
SAS Viya Workbench is a cloud-based application for Python and SAS developers and data scientists that is accessed through a browser. You can run SAS 9 code and SAS Viya analytics within the same environment without having to install either SAS 9 or SAS Viya.
SAS Viya Workbench is for SAS programmers who want to access SAS in VS (Visual Studio) Code using their choice of running traditional SAS program files (.sas) or using the SAS Notebook (.sasnb) format with features familiar to users of Python notebooks such as markdown cells with inline output and log displays. It is also for Python programmers who use VS Code or Jupyter Notebooks.
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In SAS Viya Workbench, users can easily manage their own environment without additional IT support. Users can also choose the compute power to match the needs of the project.
The compute power can be scaled up or down by the user with a simple restart of the workbench to make sure you only use the resources needed for your specific analysis task. This can reduce the cost of running workbench since cloud providers charge by the resources used. No need to be concerned about resizing your environment since all work is saved between restarts of the environment so that nothing is lost. After a restart, you pick up where you left off in the previous session.
Here are some capabilities of SAS Viya Workbench.
You might want to think of SAS Viya Workbench as a convenient standalone cloud-based application that can also be a stepping stone towards a full SAS Viya environment if-and-when enterprise capabilities are needed. Additional Viya enterprise capabilities that you may want are shown in the chart below.
A really good way to get a taste of using Workbench is to view the quick start tutorial youtube videos. I highly recommend you watch the 12-minute Getting Started video from this series of Quick Start Tutorial videos.
The sasviya.ml package
We also provide you with a repository of Python notebooks, SAS programs and sample data for use in SAS Viya Workbench. SAS9 users can use their code and experiment with new Viya procedures that can coexist and run in workbench without requiring a full Viya environment. The SAS procedures run multi-threaded where it makes sense, providing performance benefits that reduce the amount of time and cost required to run your analysis.
Python users can also benefit from using SAS Libraries that offer performance improvements over traditional libraries. SAS wrote the sasviya.ml package for Python users to run in SAS Viya Workbench. This is from a recent post:
The sasviya.ml package is designed to integrate with scikit-learn, so the sasviya.ml model objects have the same syntax and most of the same functionality as the equivalent scikit-learn model objects. The major difference is in the execution, the models in the sasviya.ml package execute using optimized SAS libraries, which takes advantage of multithreading and can yield much faster runtimes than the equivalent models in scikit-learn.
Examples
These examples provide an excellent framework you can modify to quickly run your own data through machine learning algorithms.
In addition to data mining and machine learning procedures, SAS Viya Workbench provides procedures for sampling, data exploration, clustering, dimension reduction, model assessment, computer vision image processing and supervised learning.
Additional Resources are available in the SAS Viya Community where interesting and relevant posts are frequently updated by community members. Examples of community topics for Python and SAS users include tips such as data access, machine learning, and using Git for source control.
E-Learning
In collaboration with my colleagues, we developed a free E-Learning training course on SAS Viya Workbench that is now publicly available on https://learn.sas.com. Simply log into your profile, search for the course Modern Data Science with SAS® Viya® Workbench and Python and activate it to get started.
Product Documentation
The official product documentation has all kinds of useful information including example use cases, data access techniques, programming examples and more.
Why use SAS Viya Workbench?
Cost-efficiency: Combined with cloud providers, you can manage computing costs by user, project and department, scaling resources as needed to only pay for what you use.
Ready-to-use environments using SAS code or Python through Visual Studio Code or Jupyter Notebook interfaces.
Projects can be shared using Git for version control and collaboration.
Improve performance by using multi-thread supported SAS libraries.
There is lots of excitement around SAS Viya Workbench, and I think these links will help guide you to the resources you need to keep you in the know.
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy exploring SAS Viya Workbench!
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