T E C H N I C A L PA P E R

SAS® 9.4 and SAS® Viya® Functional Comparison

Last update: January 2020
Contents
SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya Functional Comparison ...................................................... 3
SAS Platform ...................................................................................................... 3
SAS Foundation........................................................................................................................................................................................ 4

Distributed Processing ............................................................................................................................................................................. 5

User Interfaces and Program Development............................................................................................................................................. 5

Administration ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Operating Environments.......................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Multi-tenancy .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Platform Summary................................................................................................................................................................................... 7

Related Product Offerings ....................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Analytics Life Cycle .................................................................................................................................................................................. 9

Data Management ............................................................................................. 9

Visualization..................................................................................................... 13
Data Mining / Machine Learning ...................................................................... 15
Econometrics ................................................................................................... 18
Optimization .................................................................................................... 18
Forecasting ...................................................................................................... 18
Text Analytics................................................................................................... 21
Visual Statistics ................................................................................................ 23
Model Management ........................................................................................ 23
Decision Management ..................................................................................... 24

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SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya Functional Comparison

SAS Platform
The SAS Platform comprises the software components that underpin SAS product offerings in analytics, data
management, and visualization. These components provide support for foundational capabilities such as
distributed processing, security, administration, program development and execution, resource management, user
interfaces, as well as integration with cloud environments, operating systems and third-party software. SAS 9.4
and SAS Viya contribute software components that can be integrated into a unified SAS Platform.

Although SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya represent two engines that support a common SAS Platform, it’s helpful to compare
the functional approaches delivered by each. Understanding these respective approaches will help you optimize
the SAS Platform for your specific business needs by leveraging the engine or engines that make the most sense.
SAS products have been developed to take advantage of both engines, and in many cases, you will find equivalent
product functionality in both engines. This document highlights the similarities and differences between the
engines and the products that leverage them.

Starting with the SAS 9.4M5 release (September 2017), SAS 9.4 programming clients could take advantage of a
SAS® Cloud Analytics Services (CAS) server in a SAS Viya environment. This means that, in most cases, you do not
have to choose between the two engines. You can use a single SAS 9.4 client such as SAS® Studio, SAS® Enterprise
Guide, SAS® Data Integration Studio, Display Manager System (DMS), or even a batch program to execute SAS 9.4
code that uses a SAS 9.4 server, and SAS Viya procedures that use a CAS server, all within the same program.

Because SAS Viya deployments include a full SAS programming run-time environment, they can provide similar
support to developers without the need for a separate SAS 9.4 environment. A SAS Viya client can execute both
SAS 9.4 code in the SAS programming run-time environment and SAS Viya procedures using a CAS server.

The following diagram depicts the relationship between SAS programming clients and execution engines. All SAS
programs are initially submitted to either the SAS 9.4 engine or SAS programming run-time environment engine.
Any SAS Viya procedure that is encountered by either engine is executed in the SAS Viya CAS server.

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SAS Foundation

At the core platform level, functionality is shared between SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya. First and foremost, both engines
support the full complement of Base SAS®. This means that SAS 9.4 programs can run unmodified within a SAS Viya
client session. In a SAS Viya environment, some of the Base SAS procedures can take advantage of a CAS server,
and others simply run on a traditional SAS Foundation server. You can find a list of CAS-enabled procedures in the
SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya 3.4 Programming Documentation: Base SAS Procedures Guide. In addition, the DATA step
itself is CAS-enabled and can therefore take advantage of distributed processing for faster execution times. Care
must be taken in converting existing DATA step code to run in CAS because splitting execution across multiple CAS
server worker nodes can result in changes in behavior of automatic macro variables, which previously assumed
single-threaded execution. Programmers are encouraged to read Steven Sober’s 2018 SAS Global Forum paper
entitled My Experiences in Adopting SAS Cloud Analytic Services into Base SAS Processes for more detail. You can
also view a recorded presentation on this topic entitled Leveraging SAS® Viya® to Improve Base SAS® Processes on
communities.sas.com.

Other SAS Foundation products such as SAS/STAT®, SAS/GRAPH®, SAS/ETS®, and SAS/OR® are fully supported in a
SAS Viya environment when they are included in related product offerings. Other SAS Foundation products, such
as SAS/IML®, SAS/QC®, and many SAS/ACCESS® interfaces are available as add-on products to a SAS Viya order.
Therefore, SAS Viya users have access to both the distributed computing capabilities of the SAS Viya products and
the functionality of the included SAS Foundation products. You can run your new SAS Viya code as well as your
existing SAS code in your SAS Viya environment, which can access both the SAS Foundation server and the CAS
server.

The way in which SAS Foundation code is executed varies according to the clients that are used in a SAS 9 and SAS
Viya environment. With SAS 9, both desktop clients (such as SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS® Add-In for Microsoft
Office) and web clients (such as SAS Studio) submit code to a SAS object spawner that then routes the job 3 to an
appropriate workspace server or to a stored process server. With SAS Viya, such requests are typically submitted
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to a launcher server, which then routes the job to an appropriate compute server. The binary files that support the
compute server execution are analogous to a SAS Foundation V9 installation and are referred to as the SAS
programming run-time environment. These files are stored in the spre directory of your SAS Viya installation.
Although SAS Studio 5.x uses the launcher server method with SAS Viya, SAS Studio 4.x, which is the default SAS
programming client for SAS Viya 3.3 and earlier, uses the SAS object spawner method.

Distributed Processing

Perhaps the most significant core platform functional difference between SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya is in the way that
each one handles distributed processing. SAS Viya leverages the CAS server, and SAS 9.4 uses SAS® LASR™, SAS®
HighPerformance Analytics (HPA) and SAS® Grid Manager. Even though SAS LASR and HPA will remain only in SAS
9.4, SAS Grid Manager functionality will eventually be ported to SAS Viya environments (targeted for 2020).
Because the CAS server is the third major evolution of the SAS distributed in-memory technology, it is no surprise
that it offers the most value. Compared to HPA, the CAS server performs better because it can retain data from
one action to the next action rather than having to reload the same data from disk for each action. In comparison
to both HPA and SAS LASR, the CAS server offers dynamic scalability, a virtual memory footprint, high availability,
parallel data loading, shared library access, and integration with open-source languages and REST APIs. SAS Grid
Manager in a SAS 9.4 environment can work in concert with a SAS Viya environment. “The grid” distributes
multiple SAS 9.4 jobs from multiple users across a cluster of machines, and each job can be further parallelized
with the DATA step and SAS procedure code executing across multiple worker nodes in a CAS server that is running
in a companion SAS Viya environment.

User Interfaces and Program Development

Although SAS 9.4 clients use a variety of interfaces, such as Java clients like SAS Enterprise Miner, .NET clients like
SAS Enterprise Guide, and web clients like SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Viya clients all use a common HTML5 web
interface. This common interface allows for all functionality to be merged into a single user experience. SAS 9.4
provides a launching page for certain web clients that is known as SAS® Home. This dashboard supports launcher
tiles that are specific to the associated SAS products. SAS Viya provides a dashboard for all its web clients called
SAS® Drive. This dashboard is oriented toward the user more than is SAS Home, enabling users to view, edit, and
share content associated with their licensed SAS Viya products.

SAS Viya has a single interactive development interface for SAS code – the SAS Studio web application. SAS 9.4 has
several interfaces, including SAS Studio (a different version from the one delivered with SAS Viya), SAS Enterprise
Guide, Display Manager System (DMS), and the Code Editor in SAS Data Integration Studio. SAS Studio 5.2
(delivered with SAS Viya) provides some unique features but does not yet provide full replacement value for all the
capabilities that are provided by SAS Studio 3.x (delivered with SAS 9.4). For example, SAS Studio 5.2 can save
programs to the local file system as well as the SAS® Infrastructure Data Server, and SAS Studio 3.x can save
programs only to the local file system. Such an approach lends itself more readily to cloud deployments. On the
other hand, SAS Studio 3.x provides support for the management of process flows, which remains to be delivered
in a future release of SAS Studio 5.x. You can find an up-to-date feature comparison of the different versions of SAS
Studio (and SAS Enterprise Guide) in SAS Studio’s Help Center.

Both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya support batch execution of SAS code as well as integration with open development
environments such as Jupyter Notebook. This integration includes execution of SAS code as well as the generation
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of SAS code from Python calls. The SASPy project, which is available on GitHub, provides this native Python
interoperability for both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya. For SAS Viya, you can also use the SAS Scripting Wrapper for
Analytics Transfer (SWAT) Python package to call CAS server actions directly, skipping the translation layer. In fact,
because the CAS server allows for direct calls from Python, R, Java, Lua, and REST APIs, you can use any integrated
development environment that supports these languages. Furthermore, you can call analytic functions that are
provided by these alternative languages within SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning jobs. Models
created using these languages can be imported and managed using SAS Model Manager, which allows for ease in
using ensemble modeling methods.

SAS 9.4 has rich support for stored processes, which allow for SAS programs to be defined and executed
interactively, either through the SAS® Stored Process web application, directly from a URL, or via clients such as
SAS Enterprise Guide. A prompting framework is provided to support arguments that are passed to these programs
at run time. Such programs can also be run in batch and can always take advantage of the SAS Stored Process
Server. SAS Viya uses job definitions to manage such code and provides functionality in SAS Studio 5.2 to define
these programs. See SAS Studio 5.2 Developer’s Guide: Working with Jobs for more details.

Administration

SAS 9.4 has several utilities to perform administrative functions: SAS® Environment Manager, SAS® Management
Console, SAS® Visual Analytics Administrator, and SAS® Deployment Manager. For SAS Viya, all this functionality
was collapsed into a single web application: SAS Environment Manager. For SAS Viya, SAS Environment Manager
was totally rewritten. The only thing it shares with its SAS 9.4 counterpart is its name. The SAS Environment
Manager interface for SAS 9.4 provides a rich set of near real-time reports about various process and system
metrics as well as an advanced event handling interface. The SAS Environment Manager interface for SAS Viya
provides similar metrics and reporting capabilities as the SAS 9.4 application but does not yet have as complete a
set of real-time reports. Both environments supply a back-end data mart that contains historical metric and logging
information for user-developed reports. SAS Viya adds an event-driven operations infrastructure to the mix, with
command line interface (CLI) access to a real-time message bus that can be integrated with third-party monitoring
applications.

Another key administrative difference between SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya is that the former uses the SAS® Metadata
Server to persist and manage data about your environment, including server and library definitions, security, user
content, and configuration information. SAS Viya persists much of this information in the new SAS® Infrastructure
Data Server (based on PostgreSQL) and SAS® Configuration Server (based on Consul). Another important
distinction is that although SAS 9.4 uses identities from the SAS Metadata Server to define users and groups, SAS
Viya leverages pre-existing customer directory services that are LDAP-based, such as Microsoft Active Directory.
The advantage of SAS Viya is that administrators do not have to worry about keeping their SAS identities in sync
with their LDAP identities as they do with SAS 9.4.

Operating Environments

SAS 9.4 can be installed on a variety of operating systems, including z/OS and several flavors of Windows, UNIX,
and Linux. SAS Viya can be installed on a Linux or Windows Server. SAS Viya on Windows is limited to SAS Visual
Data Mining and Machine Learning, SAS Visual Statistics, and SAS Visual Analytics. It is also limited to
singlemachine environments in which the CAS server and all other supporting servers and services are installed on
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the same physical or virtual machine. Both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya can be deployed to a public or private cloud,
which can be used as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

In addition, SAS provides deployment automation scripts that are native to certain public cloud providers. For
example, a SAS 9.4 SAS Grid Manager reference deployment is available as the SAS Grid on AWS Quick Start
deployment script. A reference deployment containing SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, SAS Visual
Statistics, and SAS Visual Analytics is available as the SAS Viya on AWS Quick Start deployment script. A similar
offering is available for Microsoft Azure’s Resource Manager as the SAS Viya Quickstart Template for Azure.

SAS is increasingly adopting strategies using Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration to provide more
composable, scalable, and maintainable deployments. The SAS® Analytics for Containers offering for SAS 9.4
provides customers with a way to build and deliver a SAS® Analytics Pro environment (for example, an
environment that includes Base SAS, SAS/GRAPH, SAS/STAT, and SAS/ACCESS) as a Docker container. SAS Viya
provides support for both pre-built Docker images as well as Docker recipes for building your own containers.
Recipes for SAS Viya containers are maintained on GitHub. SAS® Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings of
select SAS Viya products use Kubernetes to more easily orchestrate complex container-based deployments.

Multi-tenancy

Both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya provide support for separating processing and data and allocating them to “tenants,”
such as different customers, departments, or levels of a deployment (for example, DEV [development], TEST, and
PROD [production]). With SAS 9.4, multi-tenancy can be accomplished by allocating different SAS application
servers to different tenants, which locks their use and their access to data based on membership in groups that are
associated with the respective tenants. SAS Grid Manager offers increased support for multi-tenancy, enabling
advanced allocation of compute resources among tenants. SAS Viya environments can be configured to handle
tenants in the same fashion as SAS 9.4, using authorization settings and separate SAS and CAS run-time
environments for each tenant. SAS Viya also offers a more explicit form of multi-tenancy out-of-the-box, which
relieves the administrator of the burden of resource isolation and provides even more separation between
tenants. In a true SAS Viya multi-tenant deployment, tenants are essentially given separate environments, with
each tenant having no awareness of the others. A single provider tenant is used to manage all the other tenants,
each of which has its own separate servers, user content, and web application entry points. Each tenant can also
be configured to point to a different LDAP server for associated users and groups. A common set of services is used
to support the entire multi-tenant environment, allowing for economy of scale in administrative functions such as
software updates and horizontal scaling.

Platform Summary

The following table summarizes the similarities and differences between certain core platform functionality in SAS
9.4 and SAS Viya deployments.

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Related Product Offerings

Many SAS Viya product offerings have counterparts in SAS 9.4. In many cases, the SAS Viya Customer Advantage
Program can provide significant financial benefit to existing SAS 9.4 customers who license related SAS Viya
offerings. The following table summarizes these related offerings.

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Analytics Life Cycle

The SAS Platform provides software that supports all aspects of the analytics life cycle, from data to discovery to
deployment. This is true for both SAS 9 and SAS Viya environments. SAS Viya environments more closely integrate
this life cycle through both a common web-based interface and clients such as Model Studio and SAS Drive. The
interface provides a task-oriented view of the software, abstracting away the underlying products that deliver the
functionality. For example, SAS Viya users can simply select “Build Models” from a functional menu, without having
to know that they are leveraging the SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning product in the process.

The following diagram maps several SAS 9 and SAS Viya products to the workflow associated with this integrated
approach to the analytics life cycle.

The following sections compare the capabilities of SAS 9 and SAS Viya in product areas mapping to this analytics
life cycle.

Data Management
Perhaps the most significant difference between data management products in SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya is in the
supported data sources. The sources that integrate directly with the CAS server in SAS Viya are known as data
connectors. The number of data connectors continues to increase, but many sources are still supported only by the
SAS 9.4 SAS/ACCESS products. However, SAS/ACCESS engines can be licensed with SAS Viya orders in order to
provide access to data sources that are not yet CAS-enabled. Such access is enabled with the SAS programming
run-time environment, which is included with SAS Viya orders. Although this access does not take advantage of the
distributed processing of the CAS server, it does provide compatibility with preexisting SAS 9.4 code and data

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sources.

One key advantage of SAS Viya over SAS 9.4 is in parallel data access through the CAS data connect accelerators.
Also, there are several cloud-based data sources, such as Twitter and Google, that are supported by SAS Viya.

A wealth of data management capability beyond data access (such as data governance, data quality, and data
integration) is available through the SAS® Data Preparation and SAS® Data Quality offerings on SAS Viya.

The following tables compare data management capabilities offered in SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya.

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Note that cells with a diagonal background fill pattern represent functionality that is available only in the
“Advanced” flavor of a given offering (for example: SAS Data Management Advanced).

Visualization
SAS Visual Analytics is divided into the 7.x series running on SAS 9.4 and the 8.x series running on SAS Viya. VA 8.x
includes many new features, such as CAS enablement, a brand new HTML5 look-and-feel, and full replacement
value for the 7.x functionality. VA 7.5 was retrofitted with a similar HTML5 look-and-feel, in addition to including
several features previously only available with VA 8.x on SAS Viya.

The following table compares the features in these respective releases.

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Data Mining / Machine Learning
In addition to supporting an expanding suite of analytic procedures, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning
surfaces a broad set of capabilities within the SAS Viya common HTML5 interface. Data preparation, modeling, and
integrated reporting all have interactive approaches that are not present in SAS 9.4 data mining offerings. As with
other products in SAS Viya, SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning supports the ability to access its
functionality through open-source languages and REST APIs. The SAS 9.4 offerings do provide a few capabilities
that are not yet present in SAS Viya. However, the latest version of SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning
provides complete replacement value for all machine learning methods and includes many that are not present in
SAS 9.4.

The following table compares the features in these respective releases.

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Econometrics
SAS Econometrics on SAS Viya provides full replacement value for all distributed procedures that are available with
SAS High-Performance Econometrics on SAS 9.4, and it adds several more procedures such as HMM, CMDC, and
CSPATIALREG. SAS Econometrics also includes a SAS/ETS license. The license allows a customer to run SAS/ETS
procedures, thereby enabling them to address virtually any econometrics and time series analysis challenge. The
SAS/ETS procedures execute only on the SAS Foundation server.

Optimization
SAS Optimization on SAS Viya includes all the optimization capabilities (to build and solve optimization models)
that have recently been developed for SAS/OR. Several optimization solvers are implemented using distributed
algorithms on CAS. Collectively, these distributed elements include and surpass the distributed optimization solver
features of SAS High-Performance Optimization. Added capabilities include distributed computation features in
mixed integer linear programming, nonlinear programming, black-box (derivative-free) optimization, and
constraint programming. In addition, the solveBlackbox action is added for derivative-free optimization, and you
can use BY-group processing with the runOptmodel action to build and solve a large volume of optimization
models from indexed input data.

Because SAS Optimization also includes a SAS/OR license, you can run SAS/OR procedures in order to use
operations research methods in optimization and in other areas such as project and resource scheduling. These
SAS/OR procedures execute on the SAS Foundation server.

Forecasting
As previously mentioned, with the SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning offering, SAS Visual Forecasting
provides a modern HTML5 interface, which is integrated across all SAS Viya products. It also shares the advantage
of being callable by open-source programming languages as well as by REST APIs.

Forecasting functionality is distributed evenly between SAS 9.4 Forecast Server and SAS Visual Forecasting on SAS
Viya. Although they share many features, each supports unique capabilities as well. SAS Visual Forecasting includes
a license for the SAS Forecast Server procedures and SAS/ETS procedures. All SAS Viya forecasting procedures are
optimized for the highly performant, resilient CAS server. In a nutshell, both forecasting offerings provide a
breadth of non-distributed capability. However, SAS Visual Forecasting offers new functionality, speed, and
resilience.

The following table compares the features in these respective releases but does not reflect the additional
functionality that is offered by the Forecast Server procedures and SAS/ETS procedures that are included with SAS
Visual Forecasting

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Text Analytics
Text Analytics functionality appears in several offerings: SAS Text Miner and SAS Contextual Analysis on SAS 9.4
and SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning and SAS Visual Text Analytics on SAS Viya. The offerings that are
based on SAS Viya add social media connectors as well as some unique features such as hierarchical column sorting
and categorical cutting and pasting. The SAS Visual Text Analytics offering on SAS Viya provides replacement value
for the SAS 9.4 text analytic capability.

Note that some of the text analytic functionality that is based on SAS Viya is available only as CAS actions and is not
surfaced in the visual interface. Also note that SAS Visual Text Analytics offers tight integration with both SAS
Visual Analytics and SAS Data Preparation.

The following table compares text analytic features in SAS 9.4 offerings and SAS Viya offerings.

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Visual Statistics
SAS Visual Statistics on SAS Viya provides many of the same features that are provided in the SAS Visual Statistics
7.x series running on SAS 9.4. In addition, it includes equivalents to most of the distributed SAS procedures that are
available with SAS High-Performance Statistics, as well as new procedures such as PHSELECT, PCA, and SPC. See
SAS Visual Statistics 8.4 Procedures for a complete list. SAS Visual Statistics includes a SAS/STAT license. This
license enables you to run SAS/STAT procedures, which enable you to address virtually any statistical challenge.
This offering also includes SAS/GRAPH, which means that all components of SAS Analytics Pro are included with
the SAS Visual Statistics offering. The SAS/STAT and SAS/GRAPH procedures run only within the SAS Foundation
server. Like other products included in SAS Viya, SAS Visual Statistics also supports the ability to access its
functionality through open-source languages and REST APIs. Note that SAS® In-Memory Statistics on Hadoop is not
available with SAS Viya.

Model Management
Both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya have a product named SAS® Model Manager to store, validate, assess, compare, and
publish analytical models. Many of the features available in SAS Model Manager on SAS 9.4 are present in the SAS
Viya version. The SAS Viya version extends the product to include an HTML5-based interface and an open, modern,
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microservices architecture. SAS Viya’s centralized model repository not only supports the ability to import models
from a SAS 9.4 environment, but also offers model registration from a broader set of modeling environments
including SAS Model Studio (available with SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning [VDMML] and SAS Visual
Text Analytics), SAS Studio, SAS Visual Analytics, and SAS Visual Statistics. SAS Viya’s version also supports Python
and R models for more open modeling support, including publishing to run-time containers. Once registered in the
common model repository, you can proactively monitor both SAS and open-source classification and prediction
model performance in order to identify deviations in model output or model input data.

In both SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya, the analytics life cycle extends beyond registering and monitoring analytical models.
The life cycle includes operationalizing models for scoring in batch, in database, in Hadoop, and within the SAS®
Micro Analytical Service. SAS Model Manager on SAS Viya adds support for retraining VDMML models using the
Model Studio interface, which ensures that the most effective model is driving business operations and decisions.
And like the other microservice-based products in SAS Viya, SAS Model Manager supports open REST APIs for ease
of access by clients such as SAS Intelligent Decisioning and SAS Event Stream Processing.

Decision Management
The SAS 9.4 decision management offerings are SAS® Decision Manager (DcM) and SAS® Real-Time Decision
Manager (RTDM). SAS Decision Manager is the predecessor to the current SAS Viya offering, which is SAS®
Intelligent Decisioning. Capabilities that are currently unique to RTDM, part of the Customer Intelligence portfolio,
include several features for constructing decisions, as with the cross-table node, and staging treatments for
delivery at a future date. SAS Decision Manager on SAS 9.4 includes unique features such as BY-group processing
when running batch decisions and rule generation.

SAS Intelligent Decisioning brings together many of the features found in DcM and RTDM such as treatment
management and advance flow management. It delivers the advantages of SAS Viya products, including an
integrated HTML5 interface, fault-tolerant scalable architecture, open REST APIs, and SAS Drive’s centralized
content management. It also supports deploying models in the SAS Viya portable ASTORE format, which can be
prouced by other clients such as SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning.

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Release Information Content Version: 1.0 January 2020

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