With the release of SAS 9.4 (which included SAS/STAT 12.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1), you might seriously consider hiring a Chief Versions Officer (CVO).
Fortunately, most of the recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide work with the different recent versions of SAS, so you have some flexibility as you decide which applications to update and when. If you want the newest features of SAS Enterprise Guide but can't yet adopt SAS 9.4, no problem. And if you want the benefits of SAS 9.4 but can't yet roll out SAS Enterprise Guide 8.2 to your desktops, that's okay too. See this chart for the full release history of SAS Enterprise Guide.
This table contains a simple mapping of what's officially supported:
| SAS Enterprise Guide version | works with SAS versions |
| 4.2 | 9.2 |
| 4.3 | 9.2, 9.3 |
| 5.1 | 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 (and 9.4m1) |
| 6.1 (and 6.1m1)** | 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 (and 9.4m1) |
| 7.1 thru 7.15 | 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 |
| 8.1, 8.2, 8.3*** | 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 |
| This same matrix applies to the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. | |
| For best results, apply all recent hotfixes to older versions of SAS Enterprise Guide before working with new versions of SAS. | |
| * Update 23Aug2013: SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 does not support SAS 9.4; we recommend at least v5.1 with the latest hotfixes. | |
| ** Update 20Dec2013: SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1m1 offers a 32-bit version as well as 64-bit. And SAS 9.4m1 once again offers a 32-bit edition on Windows. | |
For a historical perspective of SAS versions, check out Rick's post about the release dates for SAS software. Believe it or not, the very first version of SAS Enterprise Guide (v1.0) shipped around the same time as SAS version 8.0 in 1999. If you tell me that you are still running that version, I would be both proud (since I helped to build it) and horrified (because it's so much better now!).
11 Comments
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Thanks for all the helpful info, Chris! I still remember working as a summer intern for a telecom company in 1999 and being DAZZLED by Enterprise Guide 1.0... Yeah, it has changed a bit since then! I don't miss Peedy the Parrot.
I was the "puppeteer" for the animated agent - Peedy, the Wizard, and the Genie. I put them in for EG 1.0, and I took them out (with no regrets) in EG 2.0.
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Chris, EG 4.3 does work with SAS 9.4, at least for me. No problems under WinXP or Win7. SAS 9.4 runs under Windows Server 2008
Lucky! Yes, even though it might work, it's not officially supported. That means that SAS hasn't fully tested that configuration, and won't commit to fixing any problems you might encounter due to incompatibility. The guidance would be: "update to EG 6.1" (or at least 5.1).
Hi,
I developed few modules on EG 6.1 with SAS 9.4 version and later my system was downgraded to make it sync with all other team members to EG 5.1 with SAS 9.3. Now, I am not able to open all my old projects saved. "Unable to Open File ***.egp, the project file version is not supported or from a later version".
Your help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks
Shankar.V
Shankar,
Unfortunately, you cannot open EGP files that were created with a later version of SAS Enterprise Guide. If you can get your SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1 back, then you can more easily replicate the content from one version to the other, especially if much of your content is in SAS programs. SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1 can co-exist with version 5.1 on the same machine. And SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1 can work with SAS 9.3 -- so if you don't need to share your projects with team members, you could continue using them with the shared version of SAS.
Unfortunately the process for copying content is likely to be manual -- copy/paste features won't work reliably between different versions of the application.
One of the very strange things about software companies is that they love to tell us how wonderful their software is now, but then later they tell us how terrible that same software is, when the new version comes out. For example, I am sure that back in 1999 the SAS marketing people were eloquent on the wonders of SAS Version 8, but today they are equally eloquent on why Version 8 is terrible, and needs to be replaced immediately by Version 9. Oh, well.
I consider Version 8, Version 9.1.3, and Versions 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4 all to be strong, stable releases that represent the best technology of their respective times. However, software technologies and architectures change over the years to accommodate need for bigger data, more efficient processing, security and management. The old releases are not "terrible", but they are limiting when customers are modernizing the way they use the software.
So yes, we're always encouraging customers to adopt the more recent releases. Since SAS has a renewal licensing model, "upgrading" doesn't necessarily provide a big new price tag for a software license -- but there is always a cost to upgrade production software and hardware.
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