SAS9.4 is going to be your best m8

  • SAS

By Tamas Bosznay

 

This will be the first in a series of posts as we dive into SAS 9.4 M8. The latest maintenance release of SAS 9.4 platform is now available, extending standard support for SAS 9.4 for another 5 years (until 2028).

M8 ? addresses several security vulnerabilities that have caused headaches for SAS Administrators over the last two years. This release aims to remediate these vulnerabilities by upgrading third-party component versions, including:

  • Replacing the delivery of OpenSSL for SAS Foundation with SSL libraries from the operating environment
  • Upgrading PostgreSQL to 14.2 or later as well as ODBC and JDBC drivers
  • Introducing Atomikos Transaction Essentials and Pervasive Encryption for z/OS
  • Upgrading Log4j to version 2, among others

SAS 9.4 M8 has also been released with Java 11, which means customers running 9.4 on older machines that do not support Java 11 will require a two-step migration. First onto a machine on which Java 11 operates following which, it will then be possible to do an upgrade in place to 9.4 M8.

When planning your SAS 9.4 M8 upgrade, it is important to consider the operating systems supported, including Linux, Unix, Windows 32-bit and 64-bit, Windows server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022, Windows 10 and 11, and Z/OS VSR1.

Note that there are a number of products that are no longer supported, including SAS Information Delivery Portal, SAS BI Portal and Portlets, SAS Web Report Viewer, ODS Graphics Editor, and ODS Graphics Designer. If there is an application not supported by M8, the recommendation is to unconfigure the product prior to the upgrade and then uninstall them after the upgrade.

We’ve started testing the various upgrade paths and developing solutions for customers impacted by the products dropping out of support.

For further details on the various ways to get to SAS 9.4 M8, watch this space and read our next post in this series!

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