SAS OnDemand for Academics

[NKormanik]

Curious if others of you have tried out SAS OnDemand for Academics.

Before I spend time getting to know it in more detail, I'm wondering if there are substantial limitations in functionality.

For example, limits on dataset size?  (rows, variables)

Latest whizbang procedures not included?  (like, Support Vector Machine)

Thoughts appreciated!

Nicholas Kormanik

[Kurt_Bremser]

I use it for all the tested code I post here on the communities. It imposes a quota on disk storage which I am always below by orders of magnitude.

You need to simply test it to see what is available. The only thing I have been missing is the use of external commands; everytime I need to give tested advice on that, I have to use my company's SAS.

[Kurt_Bremser]

PS The quota is 5 GB (at least mine is).

[Reeza]

Relative to what?
It's better and faster than SAS University Edition, but less powerful than SAS on an Enterprise Server will be. It has almost all modules available in Studio tool, including IML, ETS and some of the HP procedures.

[NKormanik]

Is there a way to find out which procedures are included?

[Reeza]

PROC PRODUCT_STATUS

https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/9.4_3.5/proc/p0b1r6856dz03xn1pfdo7tosjqqp.htm

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@NKormanik wrote:

Is there a way to find out which procedures are included?

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[NKormanik]

I just tried out the following example:

SAS Help Center: Example 9.1 Home Equity Loan Case

Received the error message:

"ERROR: Libref MYCAS is not assigned."

Any comments or suggestions?

Thanks!

[Kurt_Bremser · Accepted solution]

MYCAS points to Viya. On Demand runs SAS 9.4.

Looked it up. SVMACHINE is a CAS procedure and won't be available on ODA.

Hey SAS (@ChrisHemedinger @BeverlyBrown @Rick_SAS et al)!

If you want to promote Viya, you MUST make a learning platform, akin to ODA, available for it. Especially for multiplicators like the Super Users and PROC Stars here.

[Quentin]

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Hey SAS

If you want to promote Viya, you MUST make a learning platform, akin to ODA, available for it. Especially for multiplicators like the Super Users and PROC Stars here.

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Completely agree.  I know a lot of SAS programmers who aren't interested at all in Viya.  I know some SAS programmers who are interested in learning about Viya and trying it out so that they can see whether it's worth trying to convince their companies to upgrade to Viya, and they are surprised that it's difficult to find a Viya learning environment (if it exists).

I asked about it at SUGA, and I think they said that it you sign up for a Viya training course, you might get access to a Viya learning environment that would last longer than the class schedule.  I also heard you might be able to call sales and get a 30 day trial access of some sort.  It's not clear if either would allow you to upload real data and play with it.  Given the clear push to Viya, I don't understand why there isn't Viya onDemand for Academics (meaning learners).

I've always assumed that the best marketing/sales force for SAS is the SAS user community, who are often called on to explain/justify the value proposition for SAS licenses (particularly in these past 10 years).  Seems like a no brainer to make it easy for the SAS community to experience the power of Viya so that we can learn the benefits of Viya and whether it makes sense for our companies to upgrade.

<steps off soapbox>

[Reeza]

Agreed, try before you buy or even approach a sales team is pretty much the expected default these days.

[Quentin]

Exactly.  Just to add, BASUG's November webinar will be about Viya for SAS 9 programmers (not yet posted on our website, hopefully will get it posted soon).  A lot of BASUG attendees (myself included) have many years of SAS programming experience, but little knowledge of Viya.  So we thought we should try to promote Viya a bit, with the aim of explaining to old-school programmers that Viya has cool stuff for them and that Viya has a compute engine/SPRE that will run their old school SAS code even if they don't want to learn CASL yet.

Would be great to be able to end that webinar by saying "Now you've seen a bit about Viya.  But you're a programmer; seeing is not believing.  As a next step you should try playing with Viya yourself by ..."

Right now, I can't end that statement.  "by calling SAS sales and asking for a trial"?  "by paying a few hundred dollars to enroll in Programming for SAS Viya"? "by going to SGF next year and hoping you can score a few hours in a Viya Hands-On-Workshop"?

It's good that Viya sandboxes are available to teachers/students affiliated with universities, so that the next generation of analysts/data scientists will have options to learn SAS while in school.  But it seems just as important to let current SAS customers kick the tires a bit so we can become informed Viya advocates.

[NKormanik]

There seem to be many new procedures in Viya beyond SAS 9.4.

How much rationale for the **bleep** envy one might feel?

Hopefully we can still arrive at the answers we seek using what we have available....

[ChrisHemedinger]

Hi @NKormanik,

I know I replied on SAS-L, but I'll repost here for the sake of others viewing this.

SAS OnDemand for Academics does have a 5GB limit for file storage, per account. Still, you can work with data that's quite large within that...and the WORK area can exceed that (I believe) when processing. The limit is for your account files in your home directory.

The software is (currently) SAS 9.4 Maint 6 and includes Base, Stat, Graph, IML, ETS and maybe a few others. In an academic setting (as a professor or as a student in a class) you can use SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Forecast Studio, as well as SAS Enterprise Guide.  Otherwise the main interface is SAS Studio -- open to any learner (no university association needed).

This environment currently has over 200,000 active users (always growing) -- so it is very popular! Even with that activity, the service is quite responsive with distributed servers in different regions to help with latency.

SAS has a different hosted offering, SAS Viya for Learners, which is available only in an academic setting (but also for no charge). Professors can build and utilize coursework around the latest data science/machine learning techniques.

Learn more and post your questions in the community:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Software-for-Learning/bd-p/sas-learning

Chris

[AKHarmoning]

I am a newbie to SAS on demand for academics. I have been able to create a folder and then a libname and import or create SAS datasets there. My question is whether I can create SAS catalogs in that libname (i.e., types of format or source or macro)?

[Kurt_Bremser]

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@AKHarmoning wrote:

I am a newbie to SAS on demand for academics. I have been able to create a folder and then a libname and import or create SAS datasets there. My question is whether I can create SAS catalogs in that libname (i.e., types of format or source or macro)?

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Yes.

E.g. the LIBRARY= option of the PROC FORMAT statement allows you to specify where the format catalog is stored.