4 capabilities of SAS Viya – SAS’ latest analytics engine

It goes without saying that the biggest highlight from last year’s SAS Global Forum was the announcement of the game-changing SAS Viya. All across the board, the latest version of SAS was welcomed as a platform built with the promise of innovative capabilities to help businesses address their most formidable analytics challenges.

This latest addition to the already impressive SAS Platform has the capacity to help anyone, from data scientists and business analysts to application developers and domain experts. The platform is bolstered by the system’s ability to deliver reliable, scalable and secure analytics inventory management, and the comprehensive analytics governance required in the modern and technology-driven business world.

In our latest blog, we highlight 4 of the core capabilities that SAS Viya successfully delivers to its users. Let’s begin with how the platform is based on fast and distributed in-memory processing.

SAS Viya facilitates faster and more distributed in-memory processing

SAS Viya comes packed with powerful processing capacity, crafted to handle multiple users and complex analytical workloads at any given time. All computing operations are distributed efficiently across the cores of a single server or via the nodes of a massive computer cluster, which means that in the instance a node does fail, operations are protected by fault-tolerant processing that makes sure the incredible speeds of the system are retained.

This processing power of the platform means that users can hold all types of data and objects in-memory for as long as they need to. Each user benefits from the availability of independent sessions that ensure optimized processing for each individual. SAS Viya’s powerful engine provides users with a secure and scalable multiuser environment, allowing them to collaborate simultaneously while exploring the exact same data at the exact same time.

A coding environment that supports open analytics

No matter what coding language an organisation’s data scientists and statisticians are familiar with, be it SAS, Python, Java, R, or Lua, SAS Viya gives them access to the incredible power of the platform’s data manipulation. Analytical professionals would benefit from the vast breadth of analytics capabilities, interactive data interrogations, and advanced analytics.

SAS Viya also provides a public representational state transfer (REST) API to all underlying functionality, which means that an organisation’s software developers can incorporate proven SAS Analytics into a wide variety of applications.

Additionally, all code written into SAS’ distributed environment is portable, which means that once it is defined, it can be run anywhere and scaled up to solve a problem for any data size. SAS Viya also comes with absolutely no infrastructure lock-in, indicating that all code built on SAS Viya can run on stream, in-database, in-memory, and in public or private clouds.

A cohesive environment that includes all aspects of analytics

SAS Viya’s platform is one that delivers a cohesive environment that integrates all aspects of analytics, which includes administration, development, and the execution of all analytical assets. All this can be achieved via a single and centralised environment.

As a result of this cohesive and centralised environment, SAS Viya provides organisations and its users the ability to comprehensively govern their analytics operations via features such as full versioning, authorship, lineage and change management. Additionally, the platform facilitates greater visibility into other areas that includes activity tracking of servers, job content, and users – making sure that all organisational data is secure and in accordance with existing policies.

A platform that is scalable and cloud-enabled

Scalability is worth its weight in gold and this is especially true in the world of analytics and data management. Fortunately, for SAS Viya users, the platform is one that is both cloud-enabled and extremely elastic, which means that users would benefit significantly from the platform’s adaptiveness.

For organisations that run complex analytical and in-memory calculations, these calculations are optimized to perform in unconstrained environments and are, similarly, automatically adjusted in constrained environments. Adaptability is heightened through SAS Viya given that it allows analytics processes to adapt to “burst processing” by efficiently utilising the resources available. Computing capacity is, therefore, adjusted and scaled in accordance with what is required, guaranteeing overall efficiency. This elasticity lets users experiment with a wide variety of different scenarios and consequently allows them to apply more complex and sophisticated approaches to increasing the quantity and speed of data coming in.

SAS Viya comes with an impressive portfolio of products that includes SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Visual Statistics, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, SAS Visual Forecasting, SAS Optimization, SAS Econometrics, and SAS Visual Investigator. If you would like more information on SAS Viya and SAS services in general, please reach out to us here. In the meantime, stay tuned to this feed for more from the world of SAS.