The end of 2016 brings with it new releases of several SAS® Data Management products and offerings. The biggest driver for new capabilities added across the portfolio is customer desire for features that provide data access to and transformation in environments outside of SAS—Hadoop in particular.
SAS® Data Loader Goes Enterprise
SAS Data Loader for Hadoop 3.1 is an important release for the relatively new product. Enterprise class features delivered through standard SAS technologies should encourage even wider adoption. Key is that deployment mechanisms have changed to more closely resemble usual SAS installations and we now support many users working together doing data management activities in Hadoop. Here are some more details:
- SAS Data Loader for Hadoop directives now participate in SAS Lineage. This improves governance for customer processes.
- SAS/ACCESS® engines can be used to access source data destined for Hadoop. Pair that with existing JDBC support and this is a great way to move data to and from Hadoop.
- SAS Data Loader for Hadoop directives and profile results are managed just like other SAS assets. They are found in SAS® Management Console folders with other SAS content.
- SAS Data Loader for Hadoop directives can be integrated with SAS® Data Integration Studio jobs. This is a huge enhancement as it allows ad hoc activity to be integrated with larger data management processes that are scheduled and monitored.
Keeping Up with Hadoop
Hadoop technologies are being updated and enhanced on a weekly basis. Hadoop support and updates in the November release of SAS are in line with a rapidly changing Hadoop distributions. We’ve enhanced our security features as well. The highlights:
- SAS now supports Cloudera 5.8 or later, Hortonworks 2.5 or later, MapR 5.1 or later, IBM BigInsights 4.2 or later, Pivotal HD 3.0
- SAS/ACCESS and Base SAS® have Ranger support and Sentry+RecordService support (except for column-level)
- SAS supports data-at-rest encryption on Hadoop for SAS/ACCESS, Base SAS and SAS® In-Database Technologies
- SAS added a new SAS Metadata Bridge for Big Data that lets us integrate with Hadoop and Google BigQuery metadata (and Tableau too).
Our customers continue to accelerate their Hadoop adoption and we intend to make it easy for SAS software to play nice with Hadoop.
Data Management Anywhere with 9.4M4
The November release of many SAS Data Management applications coincides with the SAS 9.4M4 maintenance release. New features across many SAS technologies make it easier to move data to and from external locations and in many cases processes the data there too.
- Now that SAS® Viya™ is in production, it too needs to be accessible from SAS 9.4 and we’ve added that ability using SAS/CONNECT, particularly in SAS Data Integration Studio, an application that many of our customers use to prepare data before reporting and analytics activities.
- SAS Data Integration Studio has new sFTP and Amazon S3 transformations for more options to get data to remote locations.
- There is now support for single sign-on with Kerberos for Teradata for many SAS technologies, something many of our large customers have asked for.
- Enhancements and optimizations for DS2, Hadoop file format access, PROC Transpose pushdown all improve capabilities for SAS® In-Database Technologies.
- We added pushdown capability for SAS/ACCESS engines for Amazon Redshift, Postgres, MS SQL Server, and Vertica. If we can push processing down to the data source, that’s better for our customers.
Lastly, a quick shout out for SAS® Scalable Performance Data Server (SPDS) 5.3, released in October, that delivered many new features particularly around Hadoop support and integration with PROC DS2 and FedSQL.
I’ve only touched on some of the more important features added across the data management software portfolio in the November release, so keep an eye out for other updates on sas.com, support.sas.com and this community.
