SAS Decision Builder on Microsoft Fabric
Making accurate and timely data driven decisions is crucial for companies as they strive to compete in the age of AI. Additionally, it is important to be able to build, test and deploy these capabilities in a user friendly and transparent manner.
SAS Intelligent Decisioning software is a cutting-edge product that delivers all these features. The purpose of this post is to introduce a new decisioning product from SAS, SAS Decision Builder, which builds upon our partnership with Microsoft.
Background
Fabric is Microsoft’s new solution for data and analytics. It brings together a range of new and existing data and analytics toolsets in a unified environment. Data that is used by Fabric is available in a data lake (Microsoft OneLake). The front page can be viewed below:
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The main goals of Fabric are to;
- Make data and analytics accessible to everyone.
By offering a combination of low/no code interfaces and coding environments, the solutions are available and usable by both business users and data scientists/engineers.
- Have all the data and tools in one place.
All data and analytics tools are available through the Fabric portal (see below). Data can be accessed in the OneLake lakehouse in a single storage format (Parquet), either directly or via connectors. There is no need to migrate data or convert formats.
Following the partnership with Microsoft, SAS have developed SAS Decision Builder, a brand-new decisioning workload available exclusively on Fabric. It is packaged as a SaaS offering and can be purchased directly from the Azure marketplace. There is no need for a separate SAS license!
About SAS Decision Builder
SAS are the only Independent Software Vendor (ISV) offering decisioning capabilities on Fabric, and the SAS Decision Builder product integrates seamlessly with customer data already in the One Lake data lake environment. If your team has existing workstreams in Fabric, you can take advantage of the power of AI-driven decisioning on your Fabric workloads.
Core Capabilities
SAS Decision Builder is built on the same underlying engine as SAS Intelligent Decisioning and therefore inherits much of the same functionality. Decision Builder enables customers to design and validate decision flows, manage business rules, and test and automate decisions at scale. We will now go through some of the key features in more detail:
Microsoft One Lake Data integration
There is full access to all the customer data stored on OneLake. Users can simply drag and drop the data they would like to build decisions on. Data produced from decisions made in Decision Builder can also be written back to OneLake for use in downstream processes, including Power BI reporting.
Building Decisioning Rules
Conditional rules can be built, tested and deployed using if/else logic. This utilises a user-friendly interface for developing and testing the rules.
Python Capabilities
SAS Decision Builder fully supports the Python programming language. It is therefore possible to develop rules, models, and perform pre/post processing entirely in Python.
Model Integration
It should be noted that SAS models and procedures are not the focus of Fabric, and therefore not of Decision Builder. However, it is possible to use models from Azure AI Services and call externally hosted models (including LLMs) using REST APIs. As Python is supported in Decision Builder, all Python model libraries are available for use.
Decision Flows
Rules, models, and data can then be combined to build end-to-end decisioning processes. This can include splits, segmentations, and A/B testing.
Fabric Monitoring Hub Integration
Deployed decisions can be monitored using the Fabric monitoring hub. This allows full oversight and transparency of what decisions are being run and when, as well as any jobs that may have failed.
Next Steps
Customers can sign up for a private preview of SAS Decision Builder, available since June 2024, with an expected general availability release in Q1 2025.
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
