NEW SAS ® VIYA ® FEATURES   The SAS® Viya® 2025.11 release is packed with updates! Explore below:   Video: Into The Viya Verse Try the Compare Data step, pin Python versions in SAS Intelligent Decisioning, and speed up your day with fresh SAS Studio enhancements – Into the Viya Verse with David Weik.   Watch now     SAS Intelligent Decisioning You can specify that a decision published to a container destination uses a specific version of Python, or you can specify that the decision uses the latest version of Python that is supported by SAS Intelligent Decisioning.   Specific Python versions     SAS Studio You can filter columns by character or numeric data types on the Published Columns tab of a table node. You can also enter search criteria for the Name and Label columns.   Filter columns   Use Case SAS Studio - Compare Data Step Ensuring data integrity across migration steps or complex ETL flows is often a manual, error-prone task, but the Compare Data step automates this by rigorously evaluating discrepancies between two data sets or even specific variables within a single table.   Compare Data Step   Tip of the Month Brought to you by David Weik Senior Software Development Engineer, SAS   Quick tip: It can be a challenge having to find the origin of an error within your code in long SAS programs.   That is where the new setting Display errors and warnings in code comes into play. It brings the error and warning notes right into your code through an underline, provides the error note right in place and you can page through them.   The feature can be activated by clicking on your profile in SAS Studio, then selecting Settings and under the Editor section, you can find the checkbox to enable it.   More information on this setting and other Editor settings can be found here in the SAS documentation:   Display errors and warnings ... View more

A demonstration of SAS Viya Copilot in Model Studio, now available on the latest 2025.12 Release.   Watch video     What you will learn Learn how SAS Viya Copilot for SAS Model Studio acts as an intelligent assistant to streamline and enhance the process of building machine learning models. Here's some of what Copilot can do for you: Build and Refine Machine Learning Pipelines: See how Copilot helps you construct predictive models (e.g., for loan default risk) by suggesting next steps, adding nodes, and dynamically generating robust modeling pipelines. Explore and Optimize Models: Experience the exploratory process where Copilot tries multiple model combinations and settings, updating you on improvements and fit statistics (like KS statistic) to help select the best modeling approach. Automate Model Selection and Tuning: Watch Copilot automatically add recommended nodes (such as imputation and gradient boosting), set optimal parameters, and explain each setting. Learn how Copilot can run models, summarize results, and provide high-level overviews, key findings, feature importance, ROC reports, and fit statistics. Interpret and Compare Models: Discover how Copilot explains model results, identifies potential issues (like overfitting), and suggests improvements. See how you can add challenger models (e.g., logistic regression), chain actions, and run improvement processes to optimize model performance. Understand Model Differences and Use Cases: Learn how Copilot describes the strengths and use cases of different model types (gradient boosting vs. logistic regression), providing links to SAS documentation for deeper exploration. Compare and Register Champion Models: Follow the process of running model comparisons, reviewing insights, and registering the final champion model into Model Manager for deployment—enabling use by AI agents in real-world applications like loan approvals. Get On-Demand Help and Explanations: See how Copilot answers questions about machine learning concepts and SAS Model Studio features, supporting both novice and experienced data scientists. ... View more

A demonstration by Sean Mealin of SAS Viya Copilot for Code Assistance, now available on the latest 2025.12 Release.   Watch video     What you will learn Discover how SAS Viya Copilot Code Assistance—currently available as a Visual Studio Code extension—can streamline and enhance SAS programming tasks. The video, presented by Sean Mulan, guides you through several practical features: Automated Code Generation: Learn how to generate SAS code by simply writing commands in comments, selecting them, and using the Copilot to produce working code. (Examples include printing rows from the SASHELP.IRIS dataset and generating statistical descriptors.) Running and Managing Code: See how to execute generated code directly within Visual Studio Code and manage results efficiently, keeping your workspace organized. Modeling Tasks Made Easy: Explore how Copilot assists with more advanced analytics, such as performing logistic regression and building random forest models, including setting aside validation data—all with minimal manual coding. Code Annotation and Explanation: Discover the add comments feature, which automatically annotates code lines for clarity, and the explain code feature, which provides detailed explanations and summaries of SAS code blocks, making it easier to understand and maintain complex scripts. Workflow Integration: Experience the seamless integration of Copilot features—code generation, annotation, and explanation—within your SAS workflow in Visual Studio Code.   ... View more

NEW SAS ® VIYA ® FEATURES   The SAS® Viya® 2025.10 release is packed with updates! Explore below:   Video: Into The Viya Verse     Check out the latest SAS Viya updates: Microsoft 365 settings, rich text in Model Studio and new flow macro variables. Plus, pro tips for SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Analytics Pro and sharing notebooks on GitHub in this episode of Into the Viya Verse with David Weik.   Watch now     SAS for Microsoft 365 A new blue banner has been added to the SAS pane in Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Click the avatar to change your settings, open your connection to the SAS Viya platform or sign out.   SAS settings in Microsoft 365     SAS Model Studio The rich-text editor for adding project notes and pipeline details now offers faster performance, improved accessibility and a redesigned toolbar. Add notes in the Project Notes panel or Insights tab and enter pipeline information by selecting Expand header in the pipeline menu. For more pipeline actions, see Actions on the Pipeline in SAS documentation.   Pipeline actions     SAS Studio SAS Studio now generates the FLOW_PLACE and FLOW_LOCATION macro variables when you run a flow. FLOW_LOCATION is the full path to the saved location of the flow. FLOW_PLACE is the location where the flow is saved: SAS Content or SAS Server.   New macro variables     Use Case SAS Model Studio - Pipeline notes editor   Boost collaboration and ensure analytic reproducibility with the enhanced rich-text editor for project and pipeline notes. Enjoy faster performance, improved accessibility and a new toolbar that makes formatting text and organizing information simple. Add notes in the Project Notes panel or expand the pipeline header to capture methodology, assumptions and findings – so your team (and future self) can quickly understand the context behind your workflow. For more details on pipeline actions, see Actions on the Pipeline in SAS documentation.   Learn more     Tip of the Month Brought to you by David Weik Senior Software Development Engineer, SAS   When I work in projects, I often find myself with a couple of files open, then I log off for the day and have to reopen all of them manually. Not anymore – workspaces can reopen files for you.   My preferred way of using them is in team projects where project-specific files need to be run before starting the actual work, so you can just open them right away.   To learn how to use workspaces, check out the SAS documentation.   Workspace documentation ... View more

About the Webinar: What happens when legacy systems evolve? In this session, Aldermore Bank and SAS share how two disconnected SAS®9 environments were transformed into a unified SAS® Viya® cloud platform. Learn how they overcame data silos, empowered teams with self-service analytics, and sparked a culture of innovation.   Date & Time: 📅 December 2, 2025 🕙 10:00 a.m. ET | 4:00 p.m. CET   You’ll discover: ✅ Practical steps for migrating from SAS®9 to SAS Viya in the cloud ✅ Tips for simplifying modernization and accelerating adoption ✅ Tangible benefits like speed, automation, and expanded analytics use cases Why Attend? This isn’t just a banking story—it’s a blueprint for modernization across industries. If you’re planning or considering a move to Viya, this session will give you actionable insights.   Register Now ... View more

NEW SAS ® VIYA ® FEATURES   The SAS® Viya® 2025.09 release is packed with updates! Explore below:   Video: Into The Viya Verse     Catch up on the newest enhancements in SAS Viya, from accelerated compute performance to sharper impact analysis, in this energetic episode of Into the Viya Verse with David Weik.   Watch now     New to SAS Viya? Get tips from an expert! Join SAS Education Director Stacey Syphus for a complimentary Welcome to SAS Viya webinar that explores how Viya empowers you to manage data, build models and deploy insights using SAS or Python, all in one powerful platform.   Register now     SAS Information Catalog The new StepInputColumn and StepOutputColumn search facets enable you to search for SAS Studio data flows by the input and output columns in the flow steps.   Search facets     SAS Studio Impact analysis helps you identify the potential consequences of making a change to a table or column. You can run an impact analysis on a table and then select columns from the table to analyze as well.   Impact analysis   SAS Job Execution Compute Tasks is a method of executing a task that prioritizes speed over resilience. The method is used to create a session, submit the program, wait for the program to finish and retrieve the output in a single HTTP request.   Compute tasks   Use Case SAS Studio - Impact Analysis   Confidently manage and modify your data assets without the fear of unintended consequences using the new impact analysis feature. This powerful tool acts as your data lineage and dependency map, allowing you to instantly assess the ripple effect of any proposed change.   With forward impact analysis, you can proactively identify every downstream report, flow and data asset that depends on a specific table or column before you make a critical update. Conversely, reverse impact analysis provides a complete upstream lineage, tracing exactly where your data originates from, which is essential for debugging, validation and governance.   Learn more     Tip of the Month Brought to you by David Weik Senior Software Development Engineer, SAS   Quick tip: How to see what’s in a CAS library. Ever loaded data into a CAS library (CASLIB) and wanted a quick, clean summary of what’s currently in memory? Instead of hunting through logs or relying on the navigation pane, you can get an instant report with a simple procedure. This is also available for the files in a CASLIB. Simply run the following code in SAS Studio: * Connect to a CAS session; cas mySess; * Move the results also into tables; ods output FileInfo=work.file_info; ods output TableInfo=work.table_info; proc casUtil;   list files inCASLib = 'Public';   list tables inCASLib = 'Public'; run; * Terminate the CAS session; cas mySess terminate; This code will generate a neat summary table in your results window and also store the result as tables in your work library. ... View more

See What’s New in SAS ®  Viya ®  Workbench Hyperparameter autotuning  The same best-in-class autotuning support available on SAS Viya can now be used by Viya Workbench customers. Check out more implementation details here: Autotuning ML Models   Workbench Tip Brought to you by Joe Madden, Workbench Product Manager     Want to try SAS ® Enterprise Guide ® with Viya Workbench? Make sure to update your SAS Enterprise Guide desktop client (via support.sas.com) to get the functionality. Click here to download the latest version.   Update EG desktop client ... View more

Explore the features of SAS Data Maker, a tool for generating synthetic data.   Watch video   ... View more

NEW SAS ® VIYA ® FEATURES   The SAS® Viya® 2025.08 release is packed with updates! Explore below:   Video: Into The Viya Verse     Get the latest on SAS Viya – from smarter modeling to Django-powered dashboards – in this fast-paced episode of Into the Viya Verse with David Weik.   Watch now     SAS Visual Analytics Choose whether a report page is available to all users or to one or more individual users. When visibility is restricted, users who are not on the selected members list cannot see the page when they view the report. Limiting the visibility of a page is useful when there are multiple report pages and not all users have the same access to the report data used.   Limit page access     SAS Model Studio The following updates have been introduced for all projects in SAS Model Studio: - The ability to duplicate a project. - The folder field when creating or duplicating a project.   Manage projects     SAS Visual Text Analytics PROC TEXTPROFILE has been enhanced to provide additional control over sampling proportions and to add additional outputs for document comparison.   Text profiling     Use Case A new feature in SAS Model Studio allows users to duplicate a project and specify a destination folder for the duplicated project. This is a powerful productivity booster for data scientists and machine learning engineers, as it streamlines the process of creating new model versions. For example, if you’ve developed a successful model and want to experiment with new features or different algorithms, you can now simply duplicate the existing project rather than starting from scratch. This saves significant time and effort since all your initial data preparations, variable selections and pipeline configurations are preserved. The ability to place the new project in a specific folder also helps in organizing and managing many projects efficiently, ensuring your workspace remains clean and easy to navigate.   Learn more     Tip of the Month Brought to you by David Weik Senior Software Development Engineer, SAS   Quick tip: Did you know that there are more than 100 additional steps available to enhance your productivity in SAS Studio? Yes, you read that right. Through the SAS Studio Custom Steps repository – which you can find here – you can browse through community contributed steps that are open source and ready to use. These steps cover the broad range of functionality available with SAS Viya, from loading geo shapefiles to cloning Git repositories to over-creating computer vision models to generating synthetic data and optical character recognition (OCR). This repository is not only a wealth of functionality but also helps you look at how others are building custom steps. And, of course, contributions are always welcome!   GitHub repository ... View more

Interacting with Azure Blob Storage for SAS Data Maker.   Watch video   ... View more

How to establish connections to Azure Blob Storage for SAS Data Maker.   Watch video   ... View more

How to generate synthetic names and addresses with SAS Data Maker.   Watch video   ... View more

NEW SAS ® VIYA ® FEATURES   The SAS® Viya® 2025.07 release is packed with updates! Explore below:   Video: Into The Viya Verse     Check out “Into the Viya Verse” with David Weik – a fast-paced look at new features, functions and standout projects, powered by the newest SAS Viya release.   Watch now     SAS Information Catalog   For table assets, the new Preview Data tab replaces the Sample Data tab. The new Preview Data tab provides improved performance for large tables, can display up to 5,000 rows of sample data, and enables you to select and copy values from the preview table.   Preview Data Tab     SAS/ACCESS   Connect to DuckDB on AWS, GCP or Azure with the new SAS/ACCESS interface, streamlining access to Parquet, Delta and Iceberg.   DuckDB LIBNAME statement     SAS Studio   Save time in SAS Studio with a new URL parameter that auto-selects your default server. It’s a small tweak with big productivity gains.   URL Parameter     Use Case   The newly added SAS/ACCESS interface to DuckDB brings the power of the high-performance, in-process analytical database directly into SAS Viya. By leveraging the familiar LIBNAME statement, data professionals can now seamlessly connect to DuckDB instances residing on popular cloud storage platforms like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage or Microsoft Azure. This feature unlocks easy access to Parquet, Delta, Iceberg and other file formats.   Learn more     Tip of the Month Brought to you by David Weik Senior Software Development Engineer, SAS   Quick tip: In the SAS Studio code editor, F1 is your keyboard shortcut to productivity.   Pressing F1 opens the command palette, a searchable interface that lets you quickly access a wide range of SAS Studio capabilities. If a feature has its own keyboard shortcut, it’ll be displayed alongside the action, helping you learn and use shortcuts more efficiently.   Whether you're navigating tools or triggering actions, the command palette is a true time-saver designed to boost your workflow. ... View more

THE RUNDOWN In this month’s edition of our SAS ® Viya ® email series, you’ll find a new landing page in the SAS Viya platform, five new steps in SAS Studio and column annotations in SAS Information Catalog. Plus, in David’s Tip of the Month, learn how to use the SAS extension for Visual Studio Code to connect to SAS Viya.   This one’s not a new feature but is a new productivity study you’ll want to check out. The Futurum Group revealed that SAS Viya helped data and AI teams execute the life cycle of collecting data, building models and deploying decisions 4.6x faster than a leading commercial platform and non-commercial open source environment. If you thought you were more productive with SAS Viya, you were right!   NEW VIYA FEATURES Check out these new features and what they mean for you. Product: SAS Viya New feature: New landing page Description: A new landing page for SAS Viya enables you to get a quick intro to all the applications, customize the look and feel of the platform, and dive right into the most relevant tools for you. Learn more.   Product: SAS Studio New feature: Five new steps Description: Five new steps have been added: Recode Values Step(Transforming Data), Hierarchical Clustering Step and K-Means Clustering Step (Statistics), Aggregate Loss Models Step (Econometrics) and Standardize Data Step (Preparing Data). Learn more.    Product: SAS Information Catalog New feature: Column annotations Description: You can now add notes to individual columns inside the Column Analysis tab of a table. Learn more.    SPOTLIGHT USE CASE Column annotations Data owners usually have a lot of implicit knowledge about specific columns in a data set. The new annotations feature inside SAS Information Catalog enables you to add notes to a specific column that provides more in-depth information about the column. For example, you could give processing information, provide historical context around values or even dive into treatments for specific scenarios like outlier handling. Learn more.   TIP OF THE MONTH Brought to you by David Weik Senior Pre-Sales Solutions Architect, SAS The SAS extension for Visual Studio Code is a great way to connect to SAS Viya if you’re a heavy coder. You can find and install it by searching for SAS in the Extension Marketplace or by using this link.   Once installed, you will be asked to create a connection profile by selecting SAS Viya and entering the URL of your SAS Viya server. For everything else, you can just hit Enter to accept the defaults. You will be prompted to sign in, which opens your SAS Viya environment, and you need to copy the displayed code back into VS Code.   Now you are all set up to start using SAS content, the SAS library explorer and of course write SAS code with full syntax highlighting, autocompletion and annotations. ... View more

THE RUNDOWN In this month’s edition of our SAS Viya email series: Option table control has been added to SAS Studio; side-by-side view for interactive windows is now available in SAS Visual Text Analytics; and eight new steps were added to SAS Studio. Plus, learn about accessibility and keyboard shortcuts in David’s Tip of the Month. Is this email helpful? Tell us what you think.    NEW VIYA FEATURES Check out these new features and what they mean for you. Product: SAS Studio New feature: Option table control Description: Use the option table control to create a repeatable group of controls that is displayed in the user interface as a table. These controls can be used in an option table numeric field, text field or static drop-down list. Learn more.   Product: SAS Visual Text Analytics New feature: Side-by-side view for interactive windows Description: A new side-by-side view is available in the interactive windows for the Concepts, Text Parsing, Topics and Categories nodes. Learn more.   Product: SAS Studio New feature: Eight new steps Description: Eight new steps have been added: Lookup Step (Integrating Data), Equivalence Tests Statistical Power Step and Multiple Regression Statistical Power Step (Generating Statistics), Assess Model Step (Managing Models), Transform Columns Step (Preparing Data), Forest Step and Robust Principal Component Analysis Step (Machine Learning), and Community Detection Step (Optimization & Network Analysis). Learn more.    SPOTLIGHT USE CASE Option table control The new option table control enables you to define full table structures within your custom step interface for the end users to interact with. You could build small data entry applications with this or provide complex configuration options for advanced usage scenarios, like custom API integrations or complex modeling algorithms. Learn more.   TIP OF THE MONTH Brought to you by David Weik Senior Pre-Sales Solutions Architect, SAS Looking at SAS documentation is always a good idea, but today, I want to tell you about a special section where you can find the documentation for the interfaces (think SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Model Studio, etc.). In the menu, you’ll find a section called Accessibility, where you’ll find guidance on how to improve your experience using the SAS interfaces. Even if you do not have any special accessibility needs, it is worth checking out this page as many interfaces have additional keyboard shortcuts that can be helpful. One of my favorites is using page up/down keys with table objects in SAS Visual Analytics.             ... View more