NOTE: SAS v9.4 M3 is available

Further to my post on flavours of SAS v9.4 (indeed, flavours of SAS v9.4 m2), this week sees the release of SAS v9.4 m3 (otherwise known as 15w29). I’ve not had a chance to use it yet(!), but the documented features that caught my eye include:

• The pre-production MSCHART procedure provides the ability to include “native” Excel charts in the Excel destination (see Chevell Parker’s paper from this year’s Global Forum)
• Product upgrades: SAS Studio 3.4, SAS/STAT 14.1, SAS/ETS 14.1, Enterprise Miner 14.1, Data Integration Studio v4.901and others
• A new product: SAS Factory Miner. Amusingly, this brand new product ships as v14.1! (to tie-in with the associated release of the SAS Analytics products)
• Increased support for secure configurations of SAS
• The upgrades to DI Studio include:
• Three new transformations (Fork, Fork End, and Wait For Completion) to manage parallel execution of branches of nodes
• The ability to embed a loop within a loop
• Support for Hadoop With Query (HAWQ) with the addition of a source designer that provides an SQL interface to store data natively in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)
• Environment Manager 2.5’s features include:
• Administration functions that were previously only available (interactively) in SAS Management Console: Managing metadata definitions for SAS users, servers, and libraries. User definitions can be viewed, created, and edited. Server and library definitions can be viewed, and SAS LASR libraries and servers and Base SAS libraries can be created and edited
• Grid monitoring functions that were previously only available (interactively) in RTM: Collecting metric data from a SAS grid. Metric data is collected and reported upon for the grid and for individual grid nodes
• SAS Backup Manager for scheduling, configuring, monitoring, and performing integrated backups. SAS Backup Manager can be accessed from the Administration tab of SAS Environment Manager
• Also for those who install & administer SAS systems:
• Changes that are expected to result in a 40% to 50% decrease in start-up time for SAS Web Application Server
• Greater re-startability in the SAS Deployment Wizard (SDW). If the SDW is interrupted during an install and then restarted during the installation phase, it will install only those SAS products that it has not already installed
• The SDW enables you to reduce the number of password prompts for required SAS internal accounts, metadata-based server accounts, and SAS Web Infrastructure Data Server accounts
• Support has also been added for compressing and validating SAS Software Depots. In addition, the SAS Migration Utility has been enhanced to protect passwords in the migration package from being exposed
• The installation and configuration of the SAS Embedded Process for Hadoop has been improved and simplified: for Cloudera and Hortonworks, Cloudera Manager and Ambari are used to install the SAS Embedded Process and the SAS Hadoop MapReduce JAR files.