Why Use Git for Data and AI Work in SAS Studio?
Recovering from a disaster – after deleting great work from my colleague
Picture the scene – I accidentally saved a broken data pipeline after deleting some great work made by my colleague. With these days of rushing to get your work done – one could easily accidentally save something you shouldn’t – and in this case I happened to delete some nice work my colleague finished a few days earlier. So, his beautifully completed data pipeline now looks like this after I made a mess:
Luckily both me and my colleague used Git to save our previously committed changes, so his work was still available in the Git repository. Thus – by looking into our commit history we easily found my colleagues previously completed data pipeline:
By right clicking on the line with the highlighted commit message, we could reset our Git repository to that state, and we got his work back in again:
The ability to move back in time to a previous version is most likely the most important reason why you want a version control system like Git in your corner.
In addition, Git provides you with a level of trust outside of our development environment as all committed changes are stored in the repository.
Git also provides a safe space to collaborate in, even when working with colleagues who accidentally deletes your work.
SAS and Git
Since its initial release in 2005, Git has grown in popularity and is today a ubiquitous part of the software development lifecycle. In a recent survey, over 93% of developers reported using Git.
SAS Studio provides Git integration to support a practical and efficient way of managing this code.
It is a standard practice to use Git with a managed version control system like GitHub, GitLab, Azure Repos, Bitbucket, and the like. They work quite similarly and can be hosted by your own organization or by the vendors who offer these systems.
As Git is a distributed version control system, each user will have a complete clone of the repository managed by Git.
A managed version control system typically holds the central and main clone of the repository being managed by Git. Thus, Git supports practices to synchronize the clones used by each user with a central version control system.
With Git and a centrally managed version control system, you get:
- Version control – Track changes and manage different versions of your code.
- Centralized backup – Ensure that your repositories are backed up on a central version control system.
- Documentation – Every committed version is documented, providing a clear history of changes.
- Collaboration – Git has built-in mechanisms for integrating work done across a team.
- Support for safe experimentation – Each clone can be worked on independently, and if anything happens that you don’t want back in – you just choose not to integrate this experiment.
- A practical way of reproducing a previous state (version) of your set of source code – Git provides ways of reverting back to any previous commits of a repository.
Over to you
From a recent survey towards our local user community we discovered that 59% are using Git on at least a weekly basis – which shows that many data and AI users on SAS are already using Git – check out this blog: Demystifying Git: A Survey of Data and AI Users on SAS - SAS Support Communities.
I have a webinar coming up shortly – please sign up if you want to learn more about Git and how to use it effectively in SAS Studio for your data and AI work.
Register here: Ask the Expert: Demystifying Git - Using git efficiently with SAS Studio | SAS UK
