Wednesday 2 December 2009

NOTE: Migrating to DI Studio

Users of DI Studio version 4.21 (available as part of the second release of SAS V9.2) benefit from the addition of the SAS code import wizard. In essence, you point the wizard at your code and it will convert your code to a DI job, including metadata for source and target tables. In practice, it has limitations, as you might expect of the first release of a tool with such high ambitions, but it is an impressive new capability. You can read more in the Data Integration Studio 4.21: User's Guide.

Under the covers, the code import wizard uses PROC SCAPROC. Rick Langston gave me a demo of this new PROC at this year's SGF and I was very impressed. Whilst it is used by DI Studio, you can also use it yourself, most notably for highlighting parallel processing (and, optionally, grid) opportunities in your code. SCAPROC is designed to operate in the background whilst your code is running, so you need to temporarily add a call to SCAPROC at the beginning and the end of your code. The SGF paper by Rick and Eric Thies provides a good introduction. SCAPROC was introduced with the first release of SAS V9.2.