SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 on Windows 7

Update 10Jun2010: the most recent distributions of SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 are now officially supported on Windows 7 (and have been for a while), and the details are in this SAS note. You can still use these instructions for interesting background information, but the install steps documented here should not be necessary. Now, back to the original post...

I'm finding that you people just love these posts about what new environments that SAS supports, so here's another one.

Even though Microsoft Windows 7 hasn't hit the store shelves yet, I want to get out in front of it and say, "Yes, it's possible to run SAS and SAS Enterprise Guide on it." Because I know you're going to ask.

But just because it's possible, that doesn't mean it's officially supported yet. Official support of SAS software on Windows 7 is an initiative planned for the first part of 2010. But in the meantime, I've done some testing on the production version of Windows 7 and documented the steps that I found will work to get the basics running. By "basics", I mean SAS Foundation (9.2) and SAS Enterprise Guide (4.2), and even configured deployments that include a SAS Metadata Server, workspace, and stored processes.

I wanted to document the steps for those on the bleeding edge, but I don't want to imply that this is official support from SAS just yet. I've placed all of the details on sasCommunity.org. Don't worry, the steps are not too crazy -- no magic spells or rare ingredients needed. Just a little bit of candy coating on the installation to make it go down a bit easier.

If it works for you or if you have feedback, I'd love to hear it. You can comment back here on the blog or use the Discussion tab on sasCommunity.org.