SAS/Access: Product Overview and Insight

Bottom Line:

SAS/Access does just one thing but does it well: it integrates data from third-party databases into SAS. Organizations that use the flagship SAS software might find SAS/Access to be a very cost-effective way to integrate data from other systems into SAS. However, if they need additional data integration features, they will likely want to investigate other products, either from SAS or another vendor.

Jump to: SAS/Access Features Table

Company Description:

Founded in 1976 as “Statistical Analysis System,” SAS is a private software company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina. Two of its original co-founders — James Goodnight and John Sall — continue to serve on the company’s executive team 42 years after its creation. It had $3.24 billion in revenue in 2017 and has more than 14,300 employees. Its software is installed at more than 83,000 sites in 147 countries, and 96 of the top 100 on the 2017 Fortune Global 500 list are SAS customers.

SAS claims to be “the leader in analytics” It offers solutions related to AI and machine learning, customer intelligence, risk management, data management, fraud and security intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. Gartner estimates that around 14,000 organizations use its data integration solutions, which include SAS Data Management, SAS Data Integration Server, SAS Federation Server, SAS/Access, SAS Data Loader for Hadoop and SAS Event Stream Processing.

Product Description:

While SAS offers other, more full-featured data integration products, SAS/Access focuses on integrating the flagship SAS software with third-party databases – making a worthy pick for a wide array of users. It promises “seamless, transparent read, write and update access to data, regardless of source or platform,” and it doesn’t require knowledge of SQL. Its designed for business users and includes data integrity and security features.

When purchasing the software, users will need to specify which data source they plan to integrate with SAS. In other words, the product doesn’t include a full set of connectors for all the possibilities; instead, users purchase only the connectors they need for their specific situation.

Features:

Deployment:

On-premise

Licensing:

Proprietary

System Requirements:

SAS/ACCESS deploys alongside the flagship SAS software. The latest version, SAS Viya, runs on Linux or Cloud Foundry. It requires a quad-core 64-bit processor, 16 GB RAM and 50 GB storage space. The system will perform better with more cores and more RAM.

It also requires Java and the Apache Web server.

Connectors

Teradata, Aster Data, Apache Impala, Datacom, Greenplum, Netezza, Vertica, Informix, SAP HANA, SAP R3, SAP ASE, SAP IQ, DB2, Oracle and Oracle RDB, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Amazon Redshift, JDBC – SAS Viya, Spark SQL – SAS Viya, ODBC and OLE DB connectors.

Design and Development Environment:

Graphic interface designed for business users

Key Capabilities

• Seamless, transparent data access
• Flexible query language support
• Performance tuning options
• Metadata integration
• Bulk loading
• Temporary table support
• Data integrity and security

Support and Services:

Training, support and consulting available through SAS and partners

Pricing:

$3,290 per unit. Note that when you purchase SAS/ACCESS, you need to specify which source data you would like to integrate with SAS.

SAS/Access Features Table

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