Thanks for your reply. Yes, Hadoop (and I'm referring here to the example enviroment of Hortonworks) is made to handle the physical side of data management with high performance. In that space, SAS High Performance Analytics can also handle the physical side. My question is focused on the user/programmer/data discovery ease of use. For me at least, SAS Data Step processing is far easier for data viewing, data discovery, data transformation and data model emergence than SQL queries (long, complex, error prone, and obtuse), except for simpler queries to join or subset data tables. Other points of view on the ease of use factors invited (SAS support?)
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