How to use SAS code with SASVA?

[Djones4822]

Hi all, I've come across many solutions on this community forum that reference raw sas code like IMSTAT or or INTNX and I'm unsure how to utilize it or where to put this code.

I'm using sas 7.3 but we'll be updating to 7.4.

Can someone explain to me how to use sas code to help with my data and reporting? I've tried searching but haven't been able to find much. I can give examples of when I've seen people suggest sas code if that's helpful

Thank you!

[Reeza]

SAS VA is primarily a GUI based tool, not a coding interface. I believe if you want to 'code' to prep your data you can get SAS Studio to create your data and upload to the LASR server. The language in SAS Studio is the BASE SAS language. 

The 'language' in SAS VA is slightly different, so not all functions work. If you look in the documentation you can see if the function is supported in CAS then it should be supported in SAS VA. 

What role do you have in SAS VA? Are you planning to make visualizations, prep data for visualizations or administrating the application? 

[Djones4822]

Since our organization is fairly small, I'm both the platform administrator and the data administrator. This question arises from some of my users wanting to know how to achieve certain solutions within their report building, and the answers I find aren't making sense.

In one case, we have a lot of database tables that we load into LASR and keeping the LASR tables updated has been a challenge. I've been told that using IMSTAT would help. 

Likewise, one of my users has requested a way to build reports using Fiscal Year rather than calendar year aggregations, one solution pointed at INTNX but I wasn't sure where that would go. We use Enterprise Guide frequently to prepare and load the data, but even there I wasn't sure how to use code to achieve the solutions they're pointing at. 

[Reeza]

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@Djones4822 wrote:

Likewise, one of my users has requested a way to build reports using Fiscal Year rather than calendar year aggregations, one solution pointed at INTNX but I wasn't sure where that would go. We use Enterprise Guide frequently to prepare and load the data, but even there I wasn't sure how to use code to achieve the solutions they're pointing at. 

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If you're using EG then you can easily modify the data. I don't know what level your data is aggregated with, but assuming it's monthly you can add a second column that would assign the month/year to a fiscal period. I'm also 99% sure this could be done on the fly within SAS VA using a created column based on a month variable. 

Without any more details it's hard to make more suggestions, and I've definitely made some assumptions with my comments above. If you need to convert a date to a fiscal year, it's probably best to start a new thread and ask that question specifically, showing what you have (variable format, types) and what you want as the output. 

I can't speak to IMSTAT, as I'm not familiar with it, I would assume SAS Tech Support would be able to help you fine tune the loading of data to your server.

[Madelyn_SAS]

SAS Visual Analytics Designer 7.4 enables you to create fiscal-year calculations.

[SASKiwi]

In only way I'm aware of to use SAS code in VA reports is via the use of SAS Stored Processes:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/vaag/69958/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p0x3cm87j971dun11jt9a...

As @Reeza has already pointed out SAS code is primarily used for data preparation and loading of tables into LASR data libraries.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @Djones4822,

may I suggest something?

SAS VA is very specialized and meant basically to upload data, already prepared and local (preferably a SAS table, but not necessarily), into the RAM memory and have some reports that take that data. Any other data preparation and complex queries should be left out of VA, the more the better. In simple words, SAS VA will report data with High Performance.

If you need to query data out of VA (such as databases) or prepare the final data (a datamart), my best advise for you would be to have a SAS Data Management or SAS Data Integration server, where you can prepare all your data as simple as possible and make it local, and push it into SAS VA.

Otherwise, you might find unpleasant surprises. 

Of course, you can technically code into SAS VA on many ways, some of them already showcased to you:

SAS Base, SAS Studio, Stored Processes (try to use them as less as possible) SAS EG, SAS DI, etc etc.

However, as said, technically possible, but also technically not good for performance and, even more interesting, perhaps the license/contract is not meant for that, so I advise to be careful with that as well (The SAS Base license provided to VA only environments are exactly that, a special SAS Base license to run LASR, not normal Base code).

Message: use the interface as @Madelyn_SAS mentioned. For other purposes, take the functionality out of SAS VA.