Migration from Unix SAS 9.3 to SAS 9.4 linux

[ChandraBera]

Hi,

We are planning to migrate from SAS 9.3 to SAS 9.4 and for that we need to check the impact of any new items(procedures,functions,statements,routines) for both new and enhanced.

Could you please help if the existing procedures will work in 9.4 or do we need to do code changes after migration??

Thank you,

Chandra

[Kurt_Bremser]

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@ChandraBera wrote:

Hi,

We are planning to migrate from SAS 9.3 to SAS 9.4 and for that we need to check the impact of any new items(procedures,functions,statements,routines) for both new and enhanced.

Could you please help if the existing procedures will work in 9.4 or do we need to do code changes after migration??

Thank you,

Chandra

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When you change your platform, you will have some pathnames that change, so you need to check your codes for that.

Procedures rarely undergo a change that necessitates changes in code; check the "What's new in SAS 9.4" documentation for that.

SAS catalogs need to be migrated, as they are version- and OS-specific. 

[ChandraBera]

Hi, Thank you for the info,its a great help.

I can see in what's new part of sas 9.4, some procedures used in 9.3 have been enhanced. Will that mean, we need to do any change after migration or all will work??.

Thank you!!

[Kurt_Bremser]

Only testing can give you a clear answer, if the documentation is not enough.

I know that we had to make changes in data step programming from 9.2 to 9.4. 9.4 issues a WARNING when possible truncation occurs. 9.2 did that only for the by variables. This actually improved our codes.

[ChandraBera]

Hi, Sure many thanks for your time.

We will make a point on the testing part once will be migrated to sas 9.4 and then confirm.

Thank you.. 

[Kurt_Bremser]

Keep your old platform in production until you have verified that your results stay the same for all existing jobs/user programs/applications.

SAS will allow you to run both servers in parallel for a time while you migrate.

[ChandraBera]

Hi,

Sure,we will do this recommendation while migration will happen.

Thank you.

[SASKiwi]

We did the same a few years ago and I can pretty much guarantee that you will need to make code changes, although not a lot. In particular we found that SQL queries didn't necessarily produce data in the same implicit order so additional ordering was required. I'm sure you will find other differences as well.

I recommend you test all important applications to ensure they work without error and that the output data is the same - use PROC COMPARE for this. Getting your 9.3 and 9.4 environments set up as similar as possible is the key to a smooth transition.  

[ChandraBera]

Hi ,Thank you for the Information for SQL.

Any procedures which are enhanced as part of SAS 9.4 but used in SAS 9.3, require change for those??e.g: Proc Contents

[SASKiwi]

You shouldn't need to change code for procedure enhancements, but you must test to confirm existing functionality doesn't change.

[maggiem_sas]

See also the topic Modifying SAS Programs for a New SAS Release in the V9 engine reference.

[Patrick]

@ChandraBera 

SAS is highly backward compatible. Required code changes will mostly be limited to cater for environmental changes (like changing the encoding to UTF-8, changes of path-names, the OS, SAS architecture, ...).

Additional functionality in a new SAS version should allow for further improvements later on but shouldn't change already existing functionality from a previous version.