End-of-Life Transition Support

SAS software has been around for decades and over the years different companies and organisations have built various kinds of IT applications utilising SAS technology. A big number of these legacy systems have come to the End-of-Life and need to be migrated to new technology and/or IT architecture. The quite straightforward way would be the “Move to Viya”- approach, but that is not always feasible for all companies as their IT architecture may have shifted from SAS to other software technologies over the years. 

As SAS technology is quite versatile the migration is not always that simple. With one single SAS code you can extract data, manipulate it, run some advanced statistical analysis for your data and finally create illustrations for your analysis. In many cases companies have nowadays decided on architecture where each of these tasks should be done with separated tools and different software. The tools for illustrations (i.e. reporting) may be another set of software that the company has chosen for data manipulation and data management. In those cases the original SAS application logic needs to be split into several different components. Varjus Consulting services can be used for helping this re-design process. 

It is quite typical that the majority of data manipulation work done with SAS applications are quite simply just SQL code that can be copied over to almost any other ETL tool “as-is”. But, there are usually also some SAS specific components, like SAS data steps, SAS procedures and SAS macros included. Replicating the functionality of these steps of the original SAS code typically requires some understanding of the SAS language. This kind of tasks is especially where Varjus Consulting expertise can be of assistance in these end-of-life transitions. 

Also, use of SAS datasets within the data processing may cause some troubles, too. SAS datasets are not relational data sets in nature, but rather simple files, much like like MS Excel. The SAS datasets are stored in these files in a way that rows (i.e. observations) are stored and processed in a specific order. This SAS feature gives the SAS ETL jobs the extra functionality of being able to refer to the past (and for coming!) observations in the code. Replicating these kinds of SAS steps in SQL requires some additional programming and processing.