The other day a colleague of mine said to me, “hey Cecily, I need to do some stats in SAS® Visual Statistics, so how do I get my data into the system?” I thought to myself, what a great question because now I get to show her how easy loading data to memory can be without actually having to brag about it. This is what I said she could do:
- Log on to the VA server (I explained which one).
- Copy your data to the auto load folder (I explained where it was).
- Wait a bit and your data is ready for use in SAS Visual Statistics.
She thought that was pretty neat!
She asked me, “what if I want to work on a newer copy of my data tomorrow?” “Not a problem”, said I. “Just add it in the same place as before, wait a bit, and it will be whipped up into memory replacing the old one”.
She asked me again, “What if I want to add some new rows to my data?” I felt she was testing me, and do you think that fazed me? I said, “add a table with only the new rows in the append folder and you’re
good to go. Then wait a bit, and your table will be slurped into memory and the new rows will be appended to the main table”.
I teach SAS Visual Analytics Administration and auto load is always a very popular topic. So, how easy is it for an administrator to set up? The documentation http://support.sas.com/documentation/solutions/va/71/vaag.pdf (you get a password from SAS) explains very nicely how to implement self-service auto load of data and you schedule it to run every 15 minutes or whatever time interval you decide. You can also customize your setup so that each department gets to choose its very own auto load
location. You can even give each department its very own server for auto load. This kind of implementation is a customer favorite and SAS® Visual Analytics Education service (see attached pdf) is a popular way to get it all set up.
When administrators attend a regular course SAS Training in Denmark -- SAS Visual Analytics: Administration, they also get to try out a real auto load implementation for a department so that they are equipped to implement it themselves.
It is very hard not to love self-service auto load for SAS Visual Analytics. I am a big fan and I hope you will become one too!
Cecily @sdkcho
