Migrating project files from Enterprise Miner isn’t as simple as you may think—in this case, “copy” just won’t cut it. Fortunately, it is possible to move or migrate all the files and folders in an Enterprise Miner project to different operating system and recreate the project on the new system. You’ll find that this process can be especially helpful when changes to the system architecture take place. However, take note: this article is only concerned with the physical files contained in the project not the project metadata. Metadata migration is usually a SAS system install option.
Before we begin, know that an Enterprise Miner project is composed of many different files and folders and many of which are not portable to a different operating system. This means that the process of moving or migrating an Enterprise project is not as simple as a copy. Luckily, to help improve this rather convoluted and fault-prone process, you can use a SAS Macro utility called the EM_MigrateProject Macro.
Details:
The EM_MigrateProject macro prepares SAS Enterprise Miner project directories and files for movement between operating environments. This includes moving SAS Enterprise Miner projects to or from 32-bit and 64-bit systems, and to or from different Enterprise Miner supported operating systems. Even locale and encoding are converted in this process. The EM_MigrateProject macro also restores prepared projects to a usable form after the directories and files are moved to a new system.
Requirements:
Supported versions include Enterprise Miner 6.1 M2 or later; this includes Enterprise Miner releases based on SAS 9.2 M3 and SAS 9.3 or later.
Limitations:
A project contains both the node results and the node properties that describe how each nodes’ results were achieved. Fortunately, the project migration process preserves both. This means if you examine the Results for each node in a migrated project, they will be exactly the same as the old system. However—as a word of warning—if you run a flow in a migrated project diagram, the results will be replaced with the results from the new system.
Also be aware that each release of Enterprise Miner provides new features and improvements. This means that even if you follow exactly the instructions or properties in a migrated project, you should expect that the training models on the new release will produce models that are significantly different from those produced on the old system.
If you want the new system to create models that are as close as possible to the models from the old system, you will most likely need to adjust the properties for some or all of the nodes in a flow. Usually, this effort is very close to that for creating a new project.
For more information and the macro see SAS Downloads: Enterprise Miner Migrate Project
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