SAS Visual Analytics or BigQuery : Data Aggregation

[Jed_Klei]

Which tool is generally considered more effective for data aggregation: SAS Visual Analytics or Google BigQuery? Please explain the key advantages and disadvantages of each platform in the context of data aggregation tasks.

[SASKiwi]

This sounds like an exam question. Without any details of the actual Data Agreggation use case it is impossible to provide any meaningful answers. Use the tools you have and are familiar with is an approach I tend to follow.

[Jed_Klei]

Hi @SASKiwi 

I am trying to find more information on which tool would be more useful for bigger data aggregation, which tool would be more efficient in performing aggregation on data.

Would it be easier to do the data aggregation in SAS VA or in BigQuery and then using the output data from BigQuery in SAS VA?

[SASKiwi]

SAS VA is really an interactive reporting tool. Unless you are doing reporting off the back of the aggregation, then I wouldn't use VA at all. You would be better off using Viya CAS server operations. Again without knowing anything about the volume of data and the level of aggregation involved it's near impossible to give useful advice. I've always found that even the traditional SAS aggregation tools like SQL and PROC SUMMARY scale well but now with Viya CAS it has its own aggregation operations.

BTW, I'm assuming you have both BigQuery and Viya available to you. I suggest you run some tests yourself to draw your own conclusions with your use case.  It's never a case of "one size fits all". Your choice of tool will depend on your use case. Someone with a different aggregation use case might find a different tool is better.  

[LinusH]

You are compairing apples and pears. It would make more sense to compare SAS VA with PowerBI, Tableau etc.
SAS doesn't really has a big data storage engine, but it can perfectly use BigQuery, Snowflake, SingleStore (the list gos on).
As @SASKiwi mentions CAS is a in-memory high speed analytics engine, and sure, aggregation one of many things it's optimised for.