Curt Monash posted a nice summary of the current and planned offerings that help to make SAS analytics more available "in the database" -- allowing you to analyze your data quickly without having to move it around so much.
If you use SAS with Teradata, Netezza, or DB2, much of this is already available to you.
And SAS' connectivity to databases is constantly improving, both by broadening the support for all databases and adding support for new database technologies. See Howard's SAS Global Forum paper for more information about the latest advances.
If you use SAS Enterprise Guide to access your data through SAS, here's what you want to remember:
- SAS Enterprise Guide generates SQL code that relies on implicit pass-through, which means that the SAS/ACCESS engine will do its best to optimize the query for the target database, and push as much work as possible to the database in order to minimize the need for moving data into a SAS session. (Moving data is typically the most expensive part of a query.)
- Some SAS procedures have been optimized to use native database features. The list of database vendors and SAS procedure support is growing: check the support site for the latest.
- For a visual reminder of how SAS Enterprise Guide accesses data: watch this YouTube video.
