Hello SAS Data Management Community,
I’m happy to announce a new release of SAS Data Management on SAS Viya, available July 24, 2018. In this release, you’ll see substantial improvements to SAS Data Management on SAS Viya, including SAS Data Preparation, SAS Data Quality, and governance. This release was designed to address the interest (need!) for “occasional users” to be a fundamental part of the analytics lifecycle, mainly around data preparation.
With that we are pleased to outline this latest release’s most impactful capabilities:
Connectivity
Data sources, repositories, and storage methods are always evolving, and as such we have added new data connections to SAS Viya. Some of the more popular connectors include S3 and Redshift. And, we have added more flexibility for your connections through the use of a new general-purpose connector called “Other”. You can find this in the connections tab in Explorer.
Improving the Experience
You know it’s not just about features and functions, it’s also about how they are brought together with a user experience that gets better each release. With that we have introduced behind-the-scenes plan saving (so you need not wait for your plan to save before starting new work), code editors for calculated columns, RTL language support, continued consistency in the user experience, and more.
Joins
Joins are powerful transformations in SAS Data Preparation. Several customers helped us recognize an opportunity to make the Join experience more convenient and more efficient. So, we have added a new option to remove and rename columns at Join time. Three transformations in one step - a big time savings.
Lineage We have made helpful updates to SAS Lineage including an opportunity to retain multiple, persistent Lineage diagrams so you can work with them later, share them with your colleagues, or refer to them as a reference.
Optional Plans
For those of you who were looking for a quick way to prepare data without the overhead of a data plan, we have taken care of you. Now, after you have performed some data preparation, instead of requiring you to save a Data Plan to retrieve your data, we now provide a few options: 1) save just the plan, 2) save just the data, or 3) both.
Social Media
We have addressed performance in our social media connectors. You will find our connectors for Facebook and Twitter to be more robust and more tolerant of latencies occurring when pulling volumes of data from these types of sites.
Tags
We have added the ability to add (and remove) tags from data objects so that you can add context to the purpose of these objects. We also have auto-tagging where tags are added to your data describing what has been found.
Transformations
New transformations are also available - Identification Analysis, Match & Cluster, Partitioning, and more. They all add terrific organizational and analytic influences to your data. Identification Analysis, as an example, will peer into your columns and determine what’s inside – Phone Number, Address, Email, Full Name, and more, with automatic tagging.
Wider Data
Wider data refers to the number of columns in a table. We have tuned SAS Viya Data Quality and Data Preparation to address these wider tables where columns are counted in the thousands and higher.
As you can see, we have a feature-rich release that should really amplify your Data Quality and Data Preparation efforts!
We believe you will find this new release to be very useful. Virtually every one of the listed features started as an enhancement request from passionate customers like you looking for even more benefits from your SAS software. Keep sending those good ideas our way through, for example, the SASWare Ballot here on the community.
Dan
1 Data Preparation Standard version included with SAS Visual Analytics
2 Data Preparation Advanced, licensed version, with advanced Data Quality and Profiling
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