Last week SAS announced the availability of a series of new releases of its Data Management products. Like any good product announcement, the description was very high-level and details were few. I’m willing to bet that a lot of you saw the announcement and were left wanting more.
Over a series of posts, I will be highlighting some of the key new features of this release for the benefit of the SAS Data Management community with the intent of answering the question, “Why should I care that there is a new release of SAS Data Management?” Today I’m going to cover our brand new, web-based architecture for SAS Data Management that uses a new environment called the Data Management Console.
DM Console, as it is referred to, functions as a kind of “home page” that allows all users – from technical, IT administrators to non-technical business – to log into and access SAS Data Management capabilities using the same web address. It runs on the SAS mid-tier and uses the SAS metadata repository for user management. With this design, organizations can now implement role-based customization of which data management capabilities are available for a given user based on his or her role and extend this to data integration, data quality, data governance, and master data management functions.
Within this new architecture, several new web-based components are now available. All of them are capable of being accessed from within the DM Console and can even be customized to display as a panel on the main Console startup page to give an “at-a-glance” summary of issues or status. The new components include:
- SAS® Job Monitor: IT users now have a centralized console for monitoring the status of and drilling into scraped job logs of all kinds to understand how the job ran and errors that occurred. No more Ctrl-F or writing scripts to search for an error in a series of log files scattered all over or trying to compare timestamps from log to log to troubleshoot how fast a job is running compared to in the past…unless you just like doing that sort of thing.
- SAS® Visual Process Orchestration: Users can design and schedule complex process flows to coordinate jobs, processes, or events from SAS or non-SAS processes easily in this new authoring environment. Sure, you could do it using a scripting language or code, but why not design it in environment that produces an output that can be easily reused, centrally managed, monitored, easily understood and debugged by even a novice user?
- SAS® Data Remediation: Just like the name suggests, this is an integrated capability to address data problems, such as exceptions, without needing to access the source application. Scroll through a listing that groups together issues with a related cause, or switch the view and see all issues related to a particular event, such as a DI job. When you’re ready, drill into any of the records that were flagged and start fixing them – all from the same place.
- SAS® Task Manager: Instead of users logging in to a help desk application to view, manage, and approve data issues, they can use this new viewing panel from within the DM Console that surfaces all actions related to and tracked by the common SAS Workflow service. Actions can be as simple as configurable alerts that notify a user when a job is complete or failed to finish due to errors or as involved as managing the approval or rejection of a fix to a data issue like a missing zip code. Because it’s all managed by workflows managed by SAS Workflow, and related to the roles defined with the SAS metadata repository, users will only see the tasks relevant to them and others in their role and be able to see how long unattended tasks have been awaiting their attention.
These components are designed as RESTful-based web services which makes them extensible beyond simple access within DM Console. This allows more enterprising users to build their own web-based interface into a component like SAS Data Remediation and expose its capabilities to users of a third-party, proprietary application in an application-specific way. It also allowsother SAS products and solutions to leverage these components for common behavior and functionality across the SAS environment.
Those of you familiar with SAS DI Studio and DataFlux Data Management Platform may be asking yourselves, “Does these mean DI Studio and DMP are going away?” The answer is no. Rather than being a replacement for DI Studio and DMP, the DM Console-based environment represents an evolution of their capabilities. Just like in biological examples of evolution, the DI Studio and DMP product lines will continue to coexist and thrive alongside the newer, more modern environment. So what does that mean? You can expect newer, more advanced capabilities and features to be made available in future releases of the DM Console-based environment. In the meantime, DI Studio and DMP will continue to be fully supported and upgradable. They will also be regularly updated and released in conjunction with the SAS release schedule.
I’m sure there will be some discussion or questions about these new features, so post them here and share your thoughts. Meanwhile, I will follow-up with future post that covers additional new features relevant to this audience.
