In SAS Viya 3.2, SAS Visual Data Builder provides a mechanism for performing simple, self-service data preparation tasks for SAS Visual Analytics or other applications. SAS Visual Data Builder is NOT an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) or data quality tool. You may still need one of those tools to perform more complex data preparation.

SAS Visual Data Builder can perform the following tasks:

• View table and column profiles – provides information on number rows and columns on the table, as well as standard and advanced metrics for the columns.
• Perform data transformations – includes items such as joining tables, transposing columns, creating calculated columns, filtering data and splitting columns.
• Create plans – a plan is a collection of data transformations (actions) performed on one or more tables.  Plans can be saved and executed again.

To access SAS Visual Data Builder from SAS Home, select ≡ > SAS Visual Data Builder from the menu.
Note: The user must belong to the pre-defined custom user group Data Builders to have permission to access the application.

For SAS Visual Data Builder, the user can select their preferred default start screen in their application Settings.

The options are:

• Show welcome dialog.
• Start with data.
• Start with new plan.
• Choose existing plan.

With the SAS Viya 3.2 release, SAS Visual Data Builder is now a separate application from Visual Analytics (VA). There is not a one-to-one mapping of the feature set in SAS 9.4: VA 7.3 Data Preparation to SAS Viya 3.2: SAS Visual Data Builder.

For more information on SAS Visual Data Builder refer to the SAS Viya 3.2: Data Preparation guide.