SAS Support Communities

Watch this Ask the Expert session to discover the evolution of SAS Viya, why it’s a revolutionary move to the cloud, and how it differs from traditional SAS systems.    Watch the webinar   Join me as I cover the four key pillars of SAS Viya that enable you to make confident decisions at every moment: reality tested AI, resilience amid uncertainty, fast outcomes and trusted results, and for everyone, everywhere. During this webinar you will learn: The massive industry shift underway to move analytic work to the cloud. SAS’ major transition in our SAS Viya architecture to ensure our customers can move their analytic work closer to their data. Beyond cloud, the many important reasons organizations are adding SAS Viya to their analytic portfolio. The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.   Q&A How hard is it to convert my existing SAS code to Viya? It’s more about being strategic about it. If you use this tool, it will access your code and show you how much of your code is portable to CAS. 95% of it can typically run in the SPREE engine. It can show you tweaks you need to make to take full advantage of things. There is probably a lot of optimization and modernization that can take place with code. Don’t just lift and shift, think of how you can innovate when you move your code.   Which cloud providers are supported? The latest release of SAS Viya (2020.1+) is supported on Microsoft Azure (AKS), and we are adding support for AWS (EKS), and Google (GKE) this month. Support for Red Hat OpenShift on VMWare is slated for sometime this summer.   What is IDC? International Data Corporation. https://www.idc.com/   For a SAS Programmer/Developer, what is the best source or reference books to get to learn more about SAS Viya? You can get started on the SAS Viya page. You can also dig into the SAS Viya documentation resources. If you’re already on SAS Viya, go to your MySAS Portal and you can find a lot of virtual learning information in your portal.   What is the minimum Viya for BASE SAS programs? BASE SAS programs can run inside SPREE. You should check out the content assessment tool to take a look at what you have and see what’s happening. You will at least need containers and a single CAS server with one worker. Things scale out in those CAS workers. You can do a programming only instance.   Can programs be controlled by our company’s scheduling software? I’m assuming you are referring to the updates. If the software is plugged into Kubernetes and the cloud systems to update containers, then yes, we are compatible with that.   How does it work with SAS/IntrNet? We currently use it a lot and want to maintain that functionality. Years ago, I remember migrating my applications to the SAS Stored Process web application because it had more robust functionality and was where development was going.  If I remember correctly, I believe they added the ability to call stored processes from the SAS Visual Analytics interface.  But then the question becomes, why not use the VA interface to surface results to end users over the web?  Well-designed reports may be able to render live, the same results you’re providing currently. Have you done the SAS Viya trial yet?  It might be worth a shot to kick the tires to get a sense of what VA can deliver visually.   Where can I learn the SAS Viya basics as a programmer? You can get started on the SAS Viya page. You can also dig into the SAS Viya documentation resources.   How do we know which parts of SAS 9.4 programs will run in Viya? What is the 5% that don’t work? The content assessment tool provides guidance on what runs directly and the types of changes you would need to make.   How is the Python programming language incorporated with the cloud SAS Viya technology? There are numerous ways to use Python with SAS (not just Viya), but the SAS Scripting Wrapper for Analytics Transfer (SWAT) package is the Python client to SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS).  SWAT allows users to execute CAS actions and process the results all from Python.  You can learn more about it here: https://developer.sas.com/guides/python.html.  For more information on open source integration, go to www.sas.com/open.   In my university we are considering using SAS cloud. However, a few of us prefer the desk copy SAS license we have now. What do you think about that? The desktop copy of any application has traditionally been preferred (think Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc.). However, the world is becoming more and more connected.  We’re rarely not connected to the internet anymore. Plus, applications are getting more and more robust using cloud applications, and the backend of these systems are extraordinarily scalable and reliable.  For example, you can’t use your laptop to quickly train a computer vision model with millions of images.  Instead, people will use GPUs and cloud computing to “borrow” that kind of computing taking the job from 2 days to 20 minutes. Plus, the SAS Cloud will deliver the latest capabilities we develop the moment they’re ready.  That’s just not available on a desktop application.  So if you want to use the latest stuff, be able to work with larger datasets (or find your laptop is struggling to keep up or taking hours to run jobs), then you should look at cloud-based offerings.    How long does the SAS Viya implementation take? I just saw a demo of a Viya deployment, and it was about 40 minutes. Implementation however (assessment, people, training, process, procurement, etc.) obviously varies significantly by organization.   Are CAS workers a similar concept to multi-threading? CAS workers are multi-threaded AND work together to be massively parallel (MPP).  Imagine a dataset with a couple billion rows distributed across multiple CAS workers persisting that dataset in memory (or intelligently swapping it so it’s “practically” in memory).  Then your run normal analytic routines on the giant dataset and all the CAS workers simultaneously process using all the cores available across the cluster.   Is the implementation similar to LSAF? I’m not familiar with that acronym. Please leave a comment with more detail and I’ll be happy to respond.   What is the name of the tool that shows you how much coding is different from existing code to CAS? It’s called the SAS 9 Content Assessment.   In terms of SAS programming and job scheduling, would that be an easy task to do in the SAS Viya cloud? Yes, SAS Studio is a programming interface included in all SAS Viya offerings (among other WYSIWYG GUIs).   When will SAS Training be more accessible to my user base along with my license? We have LinkedIn Learning and Pluralsight but none of the new SAS Software is available on those platforms. We offer a lot of different learning formats (https://www.sas.com/en_us/training/courses/learning-formats.html ) however I’m not familiar with the channels our education division is using to deliver training. I’d reach out to them to learn more about that. There is a contact us link at the bottom of the page listed above.     Recommended Resources SAS Viya Web Page SAS | Microsoft Web Page Travel to Faster, Trusted Decisions in the Cloud Webinar Series Content Assessment Tool Pondering AI Podcast   Want more tips? Be sure to subscribe to the Ask the Expert board to receive follow up Q&A, slides and recordings from other SAS Ask the Expert webinars.       ... View more

Hi SAS Viya Community! I’m presenting a live “Ask the Expert” webinar on May 4 th , 11 – 11:45 AM ET entitled Demystifying SAS Viya. Join me to discover the evolution of SAS Viya, why it’s a revolutionary move to the cloud, and how it differs from traditional SAS systems. I’ll host a live Q&A session at the end of the webinar. You will learn: The massive industry shift underway to move analytic work to the cloud. SAS’ major transition in our SAS Viya architecture to ensure our customers can move their analytic work closer to their data. Beyond cloud, the many important reasons organizations are adding SAS Viya to their analytic portfolio. the advanced features of SAS survey procs. Reserve your spot for the webinar.   Want more tips? Be sure to subscribe to the Ask the Expert board to receive follow up Q&A, slides and recordings from this and other SAS Ask the Expert webinars.   Can't join the live event? You can view this and other Ask the Expert sessions on-demand here.  ... View more

A young character named Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”  Although relevant to life, it’s also relevant to what’s happening in the data management space for Hadoop.  You don’t need to skip your Hadoop certification class to appreciate how extraordinary and fast this industry is moving, but if you slow down just a bit you can get a glimpse into what’s happening.   Let’s talk about three key elements that drive data management for Hadoop. First, I apologize in advance, but I have to say the phrase that is all too familiar… anyone, anyone…  “big data.”  New data paradigms are exploding and driving changes in data management practices. For most companies, big data is the reality of doing business. It’s the proliferation of structured and unstructured data that floods organizations on a daily basis – and, if managed well, that can deliver powerful insights.   Second, new ways of thinking around analytic design are emerging. Driven in part by the millennial generation and gaming mentality, Design involves the use of all available tools in order to experiment, innovate, and create new techniques and approaches to data and analytics, as well as refining the art of data-driven decisions.   Third, analytic deployment is the mature analytic framework that places significant value on putting the analytic process into production. Design is cool and necessary for innovation, but creative concepts need to be turned into cost savings, profit, or risk mitigation to add real value to the organization. When you combine the art of analytic design, the application of deployment, and fuel them both with massive amounts of complex data, you get the new analytics culture.  As the analytic needs of this culture grow and change, so do their data management needs.   Analytic data prep vs. data warehousing My colleagues and I see data preparation for the new analytics culture distinctly different from traditional data warehousing. Data warehousing techniques, and many of the tools that support them, are designed to conform data into standard schemas that are well organized and optimized for building efficient queries. The tools and processes are designed for the back office, used by a data management specialist, for the purposes of giving a finished dataset to analytic and reporting users. Unfortunately this process falls short of providing what the end user really wants, and ultimately forces a scarce resource to perform all kinds of pre-analytic data management magic to do their job. In fact, it’s commonly understood that 80% of a statistician’s time is spent preparing the data, and subsequently re-working the data as they move through the analytic lifecycle. This disconnect between the people and technology is worth a look. More particularly, it comes with the following challenges: Wide table = good, star schema = bad. Analytic works requires very wide, very detailed tables, often having hundreds or even thousands of variables. Transposition is the statistician’s friend, and pre-aggregation equals pre-determined statistics. Data doesn’t usually come out of the warehouse this way. Do over. Analytic work is iterative. Data management tools as the exclusive domain of IT, paired with cumbersome business processes for getting modified datasets, forces the analytic resources to take matters into their own hands. Not all quality is the same. De-duplicating data, or matching addresses can be important when considering general data quality. But analytic teams spend tons of time developing their own algorithms for analytic data preparation. Things like gender matching, parsing, match coding, imputation, or pattern matching techniques are used to enrich data for analytics. The final step. Feeding data into high-performing analytic systems is work often left to the analytic people, and can be one of the more difficult tasks when the data management work isn’t tightly coupled with the analytic platforms, either physically or with common metadata.   How to simplify data management in Hadoop One SAS technology that can help give back some of this 80% of lost time to the new analytics culture is SAS® Data Loader for Hadoop. This easy-to-use, self-service tool works inside the Hadoop Platform to enable: data movement to and from source systems data quality data profiling data transformation data loading into our in-memory analytic platform By providing sophisticated data management capabilities to both the design and deployment cultures, analytic people can spend more time developing innovative models, and less time working on their data, all inside the Hadoop Platform.   The world of analytic data management is moving pretty fast.  I can’t say you will earn a day off by giving the analytic teams more time to focus on modeling (by simplifying their data management processes), but it will certainly make you a hero!   Take this Ferrari for a spin by visiting the SAS® Data Loader for Hadoop web page.   Also, follow the Data Management section of the SAS Communities Library (Click Subscribe in the pink-shaded bar of the section) for more articles on how SAS Data Management works with Hadoop. Here are links to other posts in the series for reference:   How to persist native SAS data sets to Hadoop (Hive) SAS/Access to Hadoop, not your parents' access engine How to leverage the Hadoop Distributed File System using the SAS Scalable Performance Data Engine How to leverage the Hadoop Distributed File System using the SAS Scalable Performance Data Server How to create SAS Scalable Performance Data Engine Tables on the Hadoop Distributed File System Your data is in Hadoop. Now what? SAS HADOOP procedure: Managing data in Hadoop is the first order ... View more