What is SAS Viya?

I asked Matthew Slaughter to briefly explain what SAS Viya is. Here is his answer:

There are many different products marketed under the label of “Viya,” and it’s not always clear how they relate to each other or how SAS Viya is different from previous versions of SAS. In a nutshell, SAS Viya is the version of SAS which runs on CAS. This begs the next question….

What is CAS?

CAS stands for “Cloud Analytic Services” and is the name of a massively parallel-processing platform for fast in-memory analytics on big data, with dynamic spillover to disk when data sets (also called data tables) get larger than available memory.

Traditional SAS reads data to and from disk row by row, which is potentially slow, but minimizes the amount of memory needed at any point in time which is why it scales well. (People comparing Viya to traditional SAS often refer to “SAS 9,” but SAS has always worked this way.)

Competing analytical tools are often designed to load entire data sets into memory all at once, which can be faster but will slow down and eventually fail as the size of a data set grows and exceeds the available memory.

CAS provides a “best of both worlds” approach, where large data sets can be loaded entirely into memory but will transition to disk-based processing automatically as needed.

The many faces of SAS Viya

The common element of all of the products included in Viya is that they all have the ability to use CAS as the underlying analytic engine. This includes point-and-click products such as SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics, but it also includes traditional SAS code running in CAS. In many cases the only change needed to make a SAS program take advantage of Viya is to point it at a CAS data set. Viya also includes R and Python packages which allow programmers to manipulate CAS data sets using those languages. Viya has its own environment for instructors and students called SAS Viya for Learners which is separate from SAS OnDemand for Academics which uses SAS 9.

Details, Details: Updates to The Little SAS Book

Earlier this year we quietly updated The Little SAS Book, Sixth Edition.  While these changes didn’t get a lot of attention, they are, in our opinion, critical to keeping The Little SAS Book useful and accurate. This is especially important for beginners who can’t be expected to know the history of SAS software or how it is evolving.

The updates include countless small changes, but mostly fall into a few broad categories:

• References to SAS University Edition have been deleted.  When we wrote the Sixth Edition not so long ago, we had no way of knowing that SAS University Edition would soon be relegated to the great bit-bucket in the sky.  As of August 21, 2021, SAS University Edition is no longer supported by SAS Institute.  Microsoft forced this change when they stopped supporting virtual machines in which SAS University Edition ran.  Fortunately for people learning SAS, there is another option: SAS OnDemand for Academics is a cloud-based version of SAS that is free for non-commercial use.

• We also clarified discussions of data set names, filenames, and paths.  The SAS language is not sensitive to case.  This is still true.  What is less obvious is that some parts of  SAS programs are not technically part of the SAS language. Filenames and paths, and even data set names, depend on your operating environment.  This doesn’t matter much if you are using an operating environment (such as Windows) that is also case insensitive. But it can matter a lot in operating environments (such as UNIX and Linux) that are sensitive to case.  It is possible to run SAS and not know which operating environment you are using. For example, SAS OnDemand for Academics runs on UNIX even if you are accessing it from another type of computer such as a Windows PC. So we took a hard look at the way we describe data set names, filenames, and paths and reworded them for clarity.

• While we were making changes, we couldn’t resist another small one.  We added the very useful SCAN function to our table of character functions in Section 3.4.  There was just one small problem. Because there was no surplus space, we had to  remove something else to make room for SCAN.  That’s why the ANYALNUM function is now gone. However, this section still includes ANYALPHA, ANYDIGIT, and ANYSPACE so the ANY family of functions is still well represented.

So how can you know if your copy of the Sixth Edition is the original version or the updated one? One easy way is to check the index to see if it includes an entry for the SCAN function.

A more technical way is to look at the back of the title page where the copyright notices appear. Near the bottom of the page, if it says

“October 2019”

then you have the original version. If it says

“Originally published October 2019 Revised March 2022”

then you have the updated version.

It’s in the Details: Keeping The Little SAS Book Accurate

The Little SAS Book, Sixth Edition is now a year old.  I have already written posts about What’s New in this edition, and the very cool XLSX LIBNAME engine.  So what more is there to say?  A lot, it turns out.  The Sixth Edition was our biggest rewrite since the Second Edition introduced the new (at the time) Output Delivery System. This post covers a few of the changes you probably didn’t notice:

• Default output has changed. You probably are aware that the default output has long been HTML (or SASREPORT in Enterprise Guide).  What most SAS users don’t know is that technically it was HTML4, but is now HTML5 (including in Enterprise Guide).  A few years ago, the default changed from HTML3 to HTML4.  If you didn’t notice the change from 3 to 4, then you probably won’t care about the change from 4 to 5 either. But it was a big deal to us because HTML4 stored images in separate files while HTML5 embeds images in the same files as text. This required us to completely rewrite section 8.12 with its discussion of saving graphics output. That complicated our lives, but it simplifies life for you if you use SAS to create HTML pages with graphics.  No more need to worry about links to your graphics files; now your graphics will be saved inside your HTML pages.

• Footnotes are gone (except the few ones under tables and chapter quotes).  In an effort to maximize readability, we worked important information into the text and deleted the rest.

• Default ODS style for PDF output has changed from PRINTER to PEARL.

• Some built-in styles have disappeared entirely including one we used a lot, D3D.  To see the current built-in styles on your system, run this: PROC TEMPLATE; LIST STYLES; RUN;

• ODS HTML statement requires PATH= in some situations when it didn’t before.  It’s complicated so just include a PATH= option, ok?

• PROC REPORT no longer requires the NOWINDOWS option to avoid opening a Report window.

• Some ODS style attribute options have new names.  For example, the option FONT_SIZE= has changed to FONTSIZE=, and BACKGROUND= changed to BACKGROUNDCOLOR=.  The old option names still work, but the new ones are considered more correct.

• There is a new way to make suggestions for the SASware Ballot.  Instead of emailing your ideas, you submit them on SAS Communities.

• Ellis Island National Monument merged with Statue of Liberty National Monument.  Also Hawaii Volcanoes National Park lost one of its museums.  (The Jaggar Museum was damaged by the eruption of Kilauea.)  We updated our data accordingly.

• The SAS family grew.  The number of SAS installations increased from 60,000 sites in 134 countries to 83,000 sites in 147 countries.

I admit that most of these are minor changes for most SAS users, but we pride ourselves on impeccable attention to detail because for programmers sometimes the details matter very much.