Should you care about 64-bit applications?

Question: Is there a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide?

Answer: SAS Enterprise Guide is a 32-bit application, even with its most recent release. As such, it is still completely supported on any 64-bit Windows machine, but it runs in the 32-bit subsystem (also known as WoW64 – short for "Windows 32-bit on Windows 64-bit"). Many of your other business applications, including Microsoft Office*, still run as 32-bit applications.

A 32-bit process cannot load or call any 64-bit modules within its process. That's a Windows architecture rule. So SEGuide.exe cannot load any 64-bit drivers or providers – it simply won't see them, in most cases.

But SAS Enterprise Guide does not communicate with SAS in-process. It talks to SAS out-of-process, where SAS is its own separate application running on the machine (SAS.exe). There is no restriction for a 32-bit application to talk to a 64-bit application across process boundaries, so this Just Works. SEGuide.exe can talk to a 64-bit SAS process running on the same machine or on a different machine (Windows or UNIX box). And a 64-bit SAS process can load 64-bit ODBC drivers or data providers, if needed (but it cannot load a 32-bit driver).

People often ask for a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide. And I know that we will offer it, someday. But it isn't as urgent as some might think, since it's the SAS process that performs all of the data access and computations, and so that's where we really exploit the 64-bit architecture.

* Microsoft does offer a 64-bit version of Microsoft Office 2010. But most organizations do not yet use it because it cannot interoperate with 32-bit add-ins (including the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office), ActiveX controls, and data providers.

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