I consult, mentor, and teach SAS administration topics. I have helped hundreds of people learn SAS technology through web training, in-person workshops, and classrooms. In all settings, I encourage questions, and as someone who works at a data-driven company, I endeavor to write down those questions for later review.
Some of those questions have informed and driven the creation of new training content. Others have led to other blog posts, like my series on General Authorization Essentials Part 1: Content and General Authorization Essentials Part 2: Functionality.
Below, you’ll find some answers to questions that have been asked multiple times from attendees of the SAS Viya Administration Fast Track course (https://learn.sas.com/course/view.php?id=532).
Can you give me more information about what a SAS Administrator does?
Reading over this resource, the SAS Viya 4 Administration Checklist, you’ll see examples of common tasks and their frequencies that an administrator will need to perform. GitHub - sassoftware/viya4-admin-checklist: This project contains tasks that are relevant to your en...
What do you get from SAS Viya that you cannot get from SAS 9.4 with SAS Grid, Visual Analytics?
This could probably be a whole topic by itself, but at a high-level: SAS Viya is a more stable and modern platform than SAS 9.4, offering improved memory allocation and new analytical functionality through its in-memory CAS engine. It is designed for cloud deployment (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or on-prem Kubernetes), which brings many benefits for administrators, including scalability and rapid reconfiguration using DevOps processes. SAS Viya is more open to integration with open source languages and natively supports Python, R, REST APIs, and Jupyter Notebooks. Scalability is handled both in CAS and through the workload orchestrator for SAS sessions. Similar to how the SAS 9 grid, you have queue-based workload prioritization and launching multiple SAS sessions via SAS/Connect. Viya provides a more consistent experience across client applications and centralizes security for both CAS data and traditional libraries. Running in containers with Kubernetes adds flexibility, resilience, and operational efficiency.
Tell me more about the /** suffix on content Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)
Content objectURIs should include the /** suffix for wider access to all the endpoints on an object. If omitted, it can have unintended results due to insufficient or narrower access. For example: ( Folders | SAS for Developers ) you can look at the endpoint documentation on folders and see there are endpoints like /members or /histories that would be impacted.
What is the use of Postgres and other services for SAS Viya?
The SAS Infrastructure Data Server is a Postgres database, and it is primarily persistent storage for user content like reports created in Visual Analytics, authorization rules, audit records, preferences, and other content. An internal or an external instance of Postgres can be used.
Additional resources:
Is there metadata server/pod in SAS Viya?
There is no metadata pod (because there is no metadata server in SAS Viya). Microservices take on some of the roles that the SAS 9 Metadata server did, like control authentication, creation of content folders, handle permissions, etc.
I have a very specific issue. Can you help me fix X, connect to Y, or change Z?
I try my best to answer these types of questions, but there will be times where the best course of action is to contact SAS Technical Support: SAS Technical Support | SAS Support. Another option for resources is to post on SAS Communities (Home - SAS Support Communities) and connect with other administrators and programmers who might have spent hours building the exact same script you are trying to make. Maybe they’ll share if you ask! Lastly, if you need experts beyond the scope of my mentoring services (Mentoring services? Did you know you could partner with instructors like me to learn about specific SAS topics? SAS Mentoring Services | SAS), you can also engage with SAS Consulting (SAS Consulting | SAS).
Do you have an idea for a feature request? SAS Product Suggestions - SAS Support Communities
How do you manage access for someone who needs to be in two groups?
Each of the individual’s group memberships contribute to their effective access to a given resource.
For example: A user in Group 1 can access Folder 1 and a user in Group 2 can access Folder 2. Assuming our imaginary user is in Groups 1 and 2, they can see both folders. If a different individual is not a member of Group 1, they cannot access Folder 1, as any access not granted is prohibited. You can think of access in SAS Viya as being “additive permissions,” meaning users gain additional rights on top of their existing permissions.
More information: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sgf/2019/10/18/simple-general-authorization-patterns
How to schedule SAS programs from an NFS disk somewhere?
There are a few different methods here. If you make the NFS volume available to the SAS Programming runtime, and you could use SAS Studio and SAS Environment Manager’s Jobs and Flows page to schedule the program or flow. (Viya 4: Loading External Path-Based Data and Viya Jobs and Flows – Time-Based Scheduling Capabilities).
Users can also batch-submit and schedule SAS Programs using a command line. Look at the pyviyatools GitHub repository. There are multiple job-related tools in the toolkit. You can also schedule jobs from the sas-viya CLI using the batch plugin, and those commands can be scripted or scheduled to be launched by a scheduling tool.
More reading material:
Can I run SAS Viya on [insert platform here]? Must I use Kubernetes?
Here you can read more about system requirements for SAS Viya here. Yes, Kubernetes is one of the requirements. Platform-Specific Requirements
What are the Pros and Cons of SAS Content vs files on NFS?
- Objects stored within SAS Content are stored within the Infrastructure Data Server, (read above: What is the use of Postgres and other services for SAS Viya?). Resources in SAS Content are backed-up by SAS Viya, and you can apply access controls to them within SAS Viya. SAS Folders are intended to store only SAS content such as code, reports, models, or decisions. Do not add data to SAS Content folders.
- In SAS Studio, the SAS Server section of the navigation pane references a path on disk, mounted as a volume to Kubernetes. That volume links to a file server or location where an individual could find SAS programs and other files saved there. Files saved here are not backed up by SAS Viya. However, it's easier to save programs here if you want to make those programs available outside of SAS Viya. Which brings me to:
- If your users are trying to collaborate on SAS Code together, you might look at version control using Git integration: SAS Help Center: Understanding Git Integration in SAS Studio
Thanks for reading. Come and attend a course or workshop and ask more questions!
Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.
