The team at Katalyze Data are super excited to see the news of the enhancements to the SAS programming run-time servers, available from SAS Viya stable release 2025.02.
To CAS or not to CAS, that is the question
If we think about how we’ve typically interacted with SAS Viya, it’s been pretty clear cut – traditional SAS processes run on the SAS Programming run-time servers (and by that we mean the SAS Compute server, SAS/CONNECT and SAS batch servers) and CAS enabled procedures run on the CAS servers.
This new enhancement however introduces a new code execution path, building on the functionality first introduced in SAS Viya Workbench. What it enables is procedures that would traditionally have run in CAS to be executed by the relevant SAS Programming run-time server.
This of course all depends on the data and where it’s stored: if the data is accessed via a SAS library, the execution of a CAS enabled procedure will be performed by the SAS Compute server; however if data is accessed via a CAS library and hosted within a CAS session, it will run on the CAS server.
Multi-Language Architecture
An interesting note about this capability is that it has been delivered through SAS’s Multi-Language Architecture (MLA for short). What that means in practice is that CAS actions called by python code and through the sasviya.ml package (which is also now available in SAS Viya) can run on the SAS Compute server.
In short, the SAS Programming run-time servers are now able to execute Python and CAS enabled procedures, as well as traditional SAS code.
What does it mean for us?
The key benefit of this architectural change is a simplification of the code execution model within the SAS Viya platform, with potentially less reliance on the use of CAS servers. This in turn introduces potential benefits on the total cost of ownership of the SAS platform. It also more closely aligns the usage of SAS Viya and SAS Viya workbench for data practitioners.
Interested in knowing more? Please reach out to the Katalyze team for a free, no-obligation consultation.