SAS Migration Services

Generally speaking, all migration or modernization projects have in common a similar workflow, technical approach, and vision. With over 18 years of experience with database migrations, our team established a proven 12-step migration process, which is also relevant for SAS migrations.

Our certified Business Intelligence and Big Data experts know all the workarounds and proven solutions that you may need when recreating your SAS applications under the new architecture.

However, some of the challenges are specific for SAS migration projects. They include:

Performance

SAS system provides for a good performance and it is difficult to compete. Thus, the main challenge of every migration is to provide for equal performance and to avoid performance downfalls.

Nevertheless, equal performance is achievable. In fact, it depends on the well-considered future state architecture.

Differences between source and target architectures

Almost 80% of all migration challenges come out of differences in source and target architectures.

Some of these challenges occur to every migration case, some of them depend on the peculiarities of the target system. However, the thoughtful architecture, well-planned process, and proper testing allow for anticipating any issues.

Our architects analyze your existing solution and design a new system with comparable functionality.  The generalized migration architecture diagram looks as follows:

For the real cases, the choice of the toolset and technologies completely depends on the functionality and peculiarities of the SAS solution. Our developers base upon our best practices and work to cover the unique needs of your business solution.

Below, we provide a real-life example of architecture diagrams from one of the projects we completed for our customers. Particularly, we moved the data from their SAS-based system to Microsoft SQL Server.

And for the code of their source system we utilized Microsoft SQL Server stored procedures. For some of those we needed to use Python and R code.

When you think about migrating your workloads a thousand questions arise immediately. You have to select the target instance, ensure the migration will be smooth and the overall system performance won’t suffer.

SAS  is a multipurpose tool that has DBMS, BI and ETL features focused on Advanced Analytics. When we select the target instance we choose the set of tools that covers all our customers’ needs.  Depending on your existing solution can be:

• SAS DB —> Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Azure Database Services, AWS Relational Database Services, etc.
• SAS ETL —> SQL Server Integration Services, Azure Data Factory, AWS Glue, etc.
• SAS BI —> Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, etc.

The clear vision of what target to choose and which tools to utilize our developers get after the analyze the architecture of your initial solution.

Our Future-State Architecture Design offer is a great way to get started. We’ll work with your team to look at the following.

• Evaluation of the existing solution
• Understanding the specific challenges
• Proposing recommendations on toolsets and methods to utilize
• Roadmapping the future migration

Take advantage of the DB Best experience and find the most appropriate solution on how to migrate from SAS and save your costs on support and licenses. Otherwise, you can think about a drastic decision to reinvent your solution. Our expertise allows for building your solution anew, based on reliable platforms and technologies.