SAS Studio vs PC SAS

[akime9]

What are the main differences between SAS Studio and the PC SAS application (other than one is in a web browser and one is an installed application) ? Are there any pros/cons to using SAS Studio instead of the installed application? Would a user that has only used PC SAS have any difficulties moving to SAS Studio? the context of this question is not allowing PC SAS users to tunnel into a server to use SAS and instead requiring them to use SAS Studio on the server.

[SASKiwi]

The main difference is where your SAS session actually runs. With PC SAS everything happens on your PC and you are constrained by your PC's processing resources. With SAS Studio you connect to a remote SAS server where your processing resources are much greater and it is a lot easier to access and share data with other applications and users. Also PC SAS is SAS 9.4 while SAS Studio can work with either SAS 9.4 or with SAS's new cloud-ready Viya product.

[mkeintz]

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@SASKiwi wrote:

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With SAS Studio you connect to a remote SAS server where your processing resources are much greater and it is a lot easier to access and share data with other applications and users.

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More resources yes.  Also more competition for those resources.

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[ballardw]

You do want to remember that SAS Studio is just an interface to the actual data engine.

While I mostly use SAS Display Manager System (sometimes called PC SAS) I do have SAS studio installed and it uses the exact same engine as the DMS as a local install.

If you have the interest/experience you can write program scripts and submit them in batch mode and never actually interface with the SAS visual interfaces.

[PaigeMiller]

Agreeing with the above but adding a drawback to SAS Studio

Since SAS Studio is in a web browser, the ability to adjust its appearance and the ability to move windows around seems limited compared to PC SAS. For example, in PC SAS, if I am doing a complicated JOIN in PROC SQL, and its not working, and I want three windows arranged in PC SAS to show the two data sets involved and the log, I haven't found a way to do this in SAS Studio. In PC SAS, no problem to have 3 windows open and arranged however I want them to be arranged to help me figure out what's wrong.

[KalebF]

10 pros about SAS Studio vs PC SAS.

I had a similar question and found this: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Ten-features-I-really-really-like-in-SAS-Stud...

1. Auto Word Completion

2. Word Highlighting

3. Clean Log

4. Autoexec

5. Snippets 

6. Code Formatting

7. Data View

8. Variable Lists

9. Code display in GUI

10. Drag n Drop

[Quentin]

I haven't used Studio but I've been happy with EG, and I imagine moving to Studio would feel similar.  There are going to be minor annoyances with any IDE change, but since Studio is the future, it's probably worth making the move.

The main point of confusion I see here for newbies moving from PC SAS to EG or Studio is the big picture realization that their code is not running on their local computer.  Which means their SAS session can't see their C: drive, because it's running on some remote server (probably linux).  So that takes time to learn, especially for people who don't have experience working on a remote server.

That said, I worked at a place where we had a linux server we had for batch jobs, but we could access it from Windows via Samba so I never really learned emacs/VI/etc.  When I started my current job and was told we had a "BI Server" I was relieved to learn I could connect to the server via putty and batch submit jobs.  Then I was excited to realize that I could run EG and save my code as .sas files on the linux server.  So I still haven't had to learn a linux editor.