At SAS Explore 2023, Bryan Harris (SAS CTO) and Susan Owenby (head of the SAS 9 division in R&D) appeared on main stage with a strong message about the future of SAS 9. From my conversations with attendees afterward, it seems clear that this is exactly what many customers have been waiting for.
To summarize what was announced on stage (and note, I have updated this list in March 2024 to reflect latest progress and announcements):
- SAS 9 will be available to our customers as they transition to SAS Viya.
- SAS is investing in SAS 9 with the creation of the SAS 9 division. The SAS 9 division comprises developers, testers and product managers, all devoted to keeping SAS 9 relevant and its customers productive with their platform.
- SAS released SAS 9.4 Maintenance 8 (SAS 9.4M8) in early 2023. The team releases SAS 9.4 quarterly security updates and fixes as needed. The next full maintenance release (SAS 9.4M9) is planned for 1H2025.
- There will be future releases of SAS 9. The SAS software support policy promises standard support for a release for 5 years from its general-availability date. For SAS 9.4M8, that puts standard support to January 2028. Assuming the planned SAS 9.4M9 sticks to schedule, that update would put standard support into 2030. With more SAS 9 releases on the horizon, support for SAS 9 will move forward beyond that for many years to come.
Building a bridge to SAS Viya
Even with this focus on SAS 9, SAS is not letting up on our attention to SAS Viya. The SAS Viya platform has monthly releases and is where most new innovation takes place. However, the move to SAS Viya from SAS 9 can be a big project, and SAS continues to build new tools and processes to help customers assess and migrate their analytics work to the more modern platform.
As part of this effort, Bryan and Susan announced that SAS Enterprise Guide will soon be able to connect to a SAS Viya 4 environment. (And, as of March 2024, this is now available as SAS Enterprise Guide 8.4!) This is a change from previous direction, and is a direct result of customer feedback. Up until now, SAS Enterprise Guide was tethered to SAS 9 only, because SAS Studio (with its many enhancements) has been the deluxe coding interface for SAS Viya. SAS Studio is still the best environment to leverage SAS Viya features, but can use SAS Enterprise Guide as a bridge to leverage your existing projects and code workflows as you adopt SAS Viya.
FREE WEBINAR | SAS ENTERPRISE GUIDE IS NOW INTEGRATED WITH SAS VIYA 4SAS programmers are spoiled for choice
In addition to these SAS 9 announcements, SAS Explore featured the premier of SAS Viya Workbench, a light-weight cloud-native coding environment for developers using SAS, Python, and eventually R. These are all native code experiences that leverage the SAS Viya platform with your favorite programming language. SAS Viya Workbench allows you to use VS Code, Jupyter Notebooks, and even SAS Enterprise Guide for your coding experience. Read more about these technology announcements in this news release.
And if you love VS Code (I do), you can use the SAS extension for VS Code right now to manage and view your SAS programs, while connecting to SAS Viya or SAS 9 environments to run programs and view results.
12 Comments
Hi Chris.
Good news. We, the fans of SAS Enterprise Guide will be able to continue taking advantage of its benefits. Hooray!!!
That's interesting. SAS 9.4 is still stuck in the 1990s needing to run in "compatibility mode" for Windows 8, Microsoft's biggest screw-up since ever. Opening files in SAS 9.4 feels like Windows 3.1, as does the toolbar and menu with all it's seriously obsolete "functions". Well, hello SAS, it's not the 1990s any longer. Get out of hibernation and update SAS, so you might be able to get some of the customers back that you lost during the past 25+ years due to negligence. Gone are the days when Universities subscribed to SAS when it was still state-of-the-art.
Hi Frank - thanks for the comment. It's true that the SAS display manager interface (full SAS install on Windows) has not changed much in recent years. SAS has instead created modern interfaces for SAS users in SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Studio within SAS Viya, and also brought the coding experience to VS Code -- which many new programmers prefer. Still, SAS 9.4 (base interface) has lots of users who depend on it, and it continues to get updates to keep it compatible with modern operating systems on Windows and Linux.
Hi Chris, this is very helpful. I tried to get to the announcements but couldn't figure out how to get there. I signed up and got to the SAS Explore on-demand page at https://www.sas.com/en_us/offers/23q3/explore-ondemand/watch-now.html#formsuccess but I don't see where to find the announcements about SAS 9 that you described. Thanks!
Hi Chris,
We enjoy using SAS EG but we are looking forward to move to SAS Viya. So, this is really good news that SAS EG will soon be able to connect to a SAS Viya 4 environment. Do you have any idea about the actual release date? I expect this should be compatible with old EG project (such as egp in version 7.1). Is my expectation too high?
Hi Jessica, the current release timeline is end of Q12024. The release will be called SAS Enterprise Guide 8.4, and it will be the same features/functions that exist today except for the addition of being able to connect to SAS Viya (as well as continued support for SAS 9 environments). You can read your EG projects from earlier versions, but once converted to a later release of EG the projects cannot be used in the earlier versions. As always, we recommend keeping backup versions if you have a mixed environment of different EG versions.
Hi Chris,
Thanks! Any idea about the actual release date? Any good news?
The release date for a SAS Enterprise Guide that connects to SAS Viya 4 is still Q12024, as far as I know.
The "What’s New in SAS 9.4 Guide to Software Updates" mentions SAS terminated support for Geocode July 2023. What does this mean exactly? I am using PROC GEOCODE today for street-level geocoding using US Census shapefiles on SAS 9.4M8, and it seems to be working. It's after July, obviously.
I think you are referring to the note relating to data packs for DataFlux. It does not apply to the PROC GEOCODE feature that lives in Base SAS.
Bonjour,
Est ce qu'on peut utiliser le setinit qui définit la fin de SAS cette année pour les prochaines années ?
In order to use SAS, you need to have a current license (SETINIT) which typically renews annually.