Hi All,

I forgot to mention my technical environment for Migration. We are migrating from 32-bit to 64-bit UNIX server. So, only in our case, we need to have a remote session to migrate the catalogs under 64-bit migration. Those who are migrating apart from the above tech. environment can migrate the files and catalogs directly. (To choose what migration methodology to be used for your migration, please utilize the PROC MIGRATE calculator -http://support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/migratecalc/

We'll be posting often our migration experience.

Thanks Easwara & Arun.

-----Original Message----- From: Philip Mason [mailto:phil@woodstreet.org.uk] Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 3:33 AM To: MOORTHY Easwara Subject: RE: Reasons to go to SAS 9

Thanks for that.

-----Original Message-----

From: MOORTHY Easwara [mailto:MOORTHYE@essilor.com.sg]

Sent: 28 July 2004 10:11

To: Philip Mason; SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

Subject: RE: Reasons to go to SAS 9

Just want to add a drop in this flowing river!!

I'm working in the Migration project of v8 to v9.

The PROC MIGRATE does not support migrating the catalogs directly.It needs

to have remote session and with the slibref option in PROC MIGRATE , it

migrates the catalog completely thru the remote session.

Also, PROC download simply converts the v8 files into v9 , if it is used

with libraries. In case of in=dataset and out=dataset, the compression goes

off and the dataset set swells almost 150%.(from 7.7Gb , it swells to 19GB),

with all details remaining the same(I used a PROC CONTENTS and a PROC

COMPARE to chk the integrity after migrating).

Will be adding more sooon.....!!

Thanks

Easwara

-----Original Message-----

From: Philip Mason [mailto:phil@WOODSTREET.ORG.UK]

Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 4:29 PM

To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

Subject: Reasons to go to SAS 9

As promised, here is my work-in-progress. I would appreciate it if people

would like to add or correct anything, and then I will post a finalised

document on my web site (www.woodstreet.org.uk) for all to use.

-----------------------------

Why is SAS better than any other product?

As the Bloor Research report says "SAS 9 is either up to or ahead of the

market".[1] <outbind://84/#_ftn1> They also say "there is no other suite of

products in the market that has the breadth of capability that SAS 9 can

provide with the level of integration that under-pins it".

Main selling points of SAS, which set it apart from other "competitors".

* Excellent/Free technical support

* Integrated platform for business intelligence & analytics, thus

reducing issues of interfacing systems

* Runs on most hardware platforms and operating systems

* Multi-tiered architecture allowing client, middle & server

tiers which can each be on different physical platforms

* Addresses all levels of user such as:

* Information consumer

* Decision maker

* Power user

* Business analyst

* Information technology user

* Different servers which are tuned for different purposes,

such as OLAP server, workspace server, etc.

* Supports all major standards such as J2EE, COM, DCOM, LDAP,

SOAP, UDDI

* Since standards are supported it means that SAS tools can be

mixed with other tools, e.g. using Enterprise Guide with 3rd party OLAP

tools, or third party front ends with SAS OLAP server

* Excellent integration with MS Office (particularly EXCEL)

via SAS add-in for MS Office, allowing an Excel user to directly access data

via SAS from the Excel environment

* SAS metadata repository supporting the OMG Common Warehouse

Metamodel (CWM) standard . http://www.omg.org/cwm/

* Also supports meta-bridges to exchange metadata with other

proprietary metadata systems which don't support OMG's CWM

* Open API to allow other systems to use SAS metadata (via

java, com/dcom, XML, etc.)

* Excellent manageability via SAS management console, which

controls whole SAS environment including:

* Metadata manager

* Server manager

* User/authorisation manager

* Scalability, resilience & performance

* Ability to do work in different places, e.g. if extracting

data from Oracle into SAS and joining it you could do the join in Oracle or

after extraction in SAS

* Can run on hardware from PCs to mainframes

* Support for mixed environment, e.g. run on PCs and AIX

* Can use grid computing hardware and distribute an

application or the platform

* Load balancing

* Failover

* Independent parallelism

* Pipeline parallelism

* Cost based algorithm to distribute processing based on the

cost of processing

* SAS Web report studio, enabling easy building of simple web

applications that will run SAS processes and return results

SAS 8 vs. 9

Main reasons to go to v9?

Here is a quote from a customer who went to SAS 9.

".piping is the big one that has made a difference to our day - jobs have

been cut by up to 60% meaning we can deliver in a much quicker time frame at

end of month."

Charles Pollack, SUNCORP METWAY

There are many reasons, but here are some that are important.

* Enhanced IOM architecture, including load balancing

* XML fully supported and mature

* Parallelism

* Support for J2EE

* Stored process server, allowing SAS programs to be made available to

anyone without needing SAS on their machine, e.g. select program from a web

browser

* EXCEL integration, click a button in EXCEL which runs a stored

process and the results appear in EXCEL

Understanding SAS 9

* Usability

* Migrate procedure helps move libraries from SAS 8 to 9

* Enhancements to ODS improve readability & usability of

output

* Metadata libname engine allows manipulation of metadata

* ODS produces more forms of output and allows more

customisation

* Format/informat length now 32

* New functions, particularly for searching character strings

and regular expressions

* All help & doc available from inside SAS

* Enhanced for people with disabilities

* Manageability

* Management console provides single point of control for SAS

admin tasks, useful for many things including: applying setinits, allowing

access to various parts of SAS, seeing who is using SAS

* ETL studio provides control for extract, transform, load

processes

* ARM (application response measurement) enables checking

availability and transaction rates in SAS

* SSL (secure sockets layer) provides network security and

privacy

* IT (integration technologies) windows object manager & java

connection service creates/manages objects supporting IOM servers

* IOM supports load balancing

* Scalability

* Runs in many 64-bit environments

* Scale up to run on SMP, scale out to run on distributed

processors, combine both to go up & out

* Parallel processing supporting threaded I/O and threaded

application processing, including:

* Indexing

* Various procedures such as: means, report, sort,

sql, summary, tabulate, GLM, Access to Oracle, Access to ODBC, SAS/Connect,

Metadata Server, etc.

* Pipeline parallelism, where multiple data steps

and/or procedures will run concurrently and pipe output from one to input of

the next http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/connect/piping.html

* SPDE engine comes with Base SAS, which implements

multi-threaded access to data

* SAS/Connect improved compression to move large

amounts of data more efficiently

* Interoperability

* Open metadata architecture provides metadata services to all

SAS applications

* XML libname engine imports/exports wider range of XML

documents

* Integration Technologies supports

* creating web services enabling cross-platform

integration

* generation of implicit/explicit events

* services for java programmers to integrate java

applications with SAS

* SAS/CONNECT libref inheritance eliminates the need

to duplicate data for use in multiple SAS sessions

Major differences between SAS 9.1.2 & SAS 9.1.3

9.1.3 will bring to life some new products, which we don't particularly

need. SAS say that it wont give us any new features which would be of great

interest. There are always bug fixes and enhancements in each release, and

is usually better to go with a later release. I would certainly advise using

it if it were available at the appropriate time.

What is wrong with SAS?

It can't be all good - so what is the down side of using SAS? What does it

fail to beat it's competitors?

Excel support

The Bloor Research report on SAS 9 had only 1 criticism and that was that

SAS 9 did not have good control over Microsoft EXCEL. This is not entirely

true since there are several ways of controlling EXCEL from SAS:

* via XML you can generate HTML with embedded XML commands which will

do almost anything within EXCEL, e.g. format a column in a particular way,

produce a graph

* via DDE we can open EXCEL and send commands through to it,

effectively remote controlling EXCEL from SAS

* via DDE we can open EXCEL and run a VB macro, which has perhaps been

created within SAS

Of course if we use the Office Add-in for EXCEL then we can access the power

of SAS from within EXCEL.

Cost

SAS is expensive. You pay a yearly fee, although this does get you excellent

support. Some other products in this market can be bought for a one off

payment. Unlike other software you get newer releases of SAS for free, as

part of the yearly fee.

________________________________

[1] SAS 9, Bloor Research 2004, Page 13