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Paul posted a blog today “Farewell to the SAS 9.2 Replication Wizard” which outlined the fact SAS have announced that the replication capbility in SAS 9.2 is no longer supported. (Usage Note 40834: The Replication Wizard in SAS® 9.2 has been deprecated)
Paul mentions it was probably lack of use that caused SAS to stop developing and supporting the replication capability, but im guessing that it was actually the fact that people used it and it didn’t work that caused the action.
Although replication was a pain to set-up, it seemed to be useful as part of the SAS 9.2 migration strategy, or alternatively intiating a new SAS environment.
What it was mean’t to allow you to do, was fully replicate an environment (say Development) to another Environment (say UAT or Prod) and automatically change all the pointers through the SAS environment to the new instance. So for example automatically changing the name of the servers if you were moving environments across physical or virtual machines or changing userid’s, file paths, ports etc.
So for 9.2 migrations it made sense to create a blank Dev 9.2 environment, migrate the 9.1 production objects to it, test the Dev environment, then replicate the Dev environment upto UAT and Prod.
As Paul quite rightly highlights the only other option was partial migration, i.e exporting and importing SAS Packages and this option is not available for all SAS content (Portal pages and Portlets being one of them until BI 4.3 is out). Its also a pain if you had to do it for 3 environments, not to mention the risk of the environments getting out of sync from day one (compared to day 99 
I know of one NZ site that took the replication approach for their migration, but unfortunately found the replication process didn’t change all references during the process, and so the environments got a little confused (to say the least). Nothing worse than Production updating files or objects in Dev it seems.
So maybe this was one of the few sites using replication, and therefore there wasn’t enough of a user base to warrant making it work properly, but it does worry me when functionality gets de-supported like this (just thankful i’m not in the middle of a SAS 9.2 migration project that was relying on this feature and hope your not either!)
| This post was kindly contributed by Blogging about all things SAS - go there to comment and to read the full post. |