French Poetry 101 and an introduction
to this paper
The French poet, Arthur Rimbaud,
talked about how one's life
is filled with periods of intense activity which
he called seasons. (One of his collections of poetry was
called A Season In Hell.) Last year brought such a season to
our lives with the second migration
of SAS® at GTE Laboratories Incorporated in
less than five years. The first move had been from
MVS to VMS, which was shortly followed by
two version 6 upgrades under VMS. The second (and
the focus of this paper) migration was from VMS
to UNIX. (A Silicon Graphics machine.)
This paper provides two radically
different perspectives on the migration -- each with valid
concerns. Hal will look at the SAS
system support issues while
Gail will discuss the concerns of a power user.
Note that neither author had tried SAS on UNIX before
it was made available at the Labs.
The outline of the paper is the
following:
From a SAS system support perspective:
1. Researching the migration
2. Announcing the migration
3. The migration
4. The future
5. From a power user's perspective
6. Conclusions
[The presentation at NESUG '93 will focus of those features and issues that would interest fledging
SAS on UNIX users. Handouts can
be obtained by contacting
the authors.]
The pre-migration effort involved
the following steps:
1. Identifying users and applications affected.
2. Determining the cost of the migration
3. Researching the implementation
differences.
Let's look at each:
1. Identifying users and applications
affected
Identifying users was made by examining who had accessed the SAS image over the past
six months. Each person (or a member
of their department) was contacted and asked several questions:
1. Was their SAS data mostly in
flat files or SAS datasets.
How many of these files were
there?
2. Did their SAS programs used macros?
3. Did their SAS programs have a
lot of VMS-specific features?
From these inquiries, the following
was determined:
1. Users were not using many VMS-specific features and their programs could be converted after little or
some effort to UNIX.
2. A major problem was that users had a large number of SAS datasets and flat files. The SAS
datasets had to be moved to the UNIX host while SAS still resided on VMS. [Suggestion #1 to SI-
( SAS Institute not Sports Illustrated)
build a means to create transport SAS datasets while SAS no longer
resides on a system. A one-time fee would be reasonable.]
3. Many applications did not have
to be converted to run under
SAS on UNIX.
2. Determining the cost of
the migration.
This was probably the most straightforward
part of the migration --
Cal your SAS marketing rep and ask the price. When I originally
researched this there was a R&D cost that was passed on to
SAS UNIX sites. However, this was no longer in effect at the time
of the migration and a reasonable transfer fee was charged instead.
3. Researching the implementation
differences.
SI staff was kind enough to supply the necessary UNIX SAS Companion and Tech Reports needed
to determine what were the differences between the SAS system on VMS and UNIX. [Suggestion #2 to SI
-- Provide or sell at a reasonable
costs SAS migration guides
from different platforms. An enterprising author could write a
book just on this topic.]
Differences were of the following
types:
1. Features that had equivalents
under both VMS and UNIX . (These were of two types: minor conversions
(such as the invocation option /fsdevice=vt100
under VMS and -fsdevice=ascii.vt100
under UNIX. Others involved more effort such as VMS logicals/symbols
to UNIX environment variables.)
2. Features that were on VMS but
not on UNIX. (Such as various formats and system options.]
3. Features that were on UNIX but not on VMS. (Such as piping to a non-SAS program using the
FILENAME pipe statement.)
How this information was presented
to the users is explained in the next section.
Before the migration could be announce,
several things had to be done:
1. Installing SAS on the UNIX host.
2. Preparing for the presentation.
1. Installing SAS on the UNIX
host.
SAS's installation was straight
forward. Some customizing took place:
1. The SAS man pages were placed
on-line and included local
documentation.
2. Some modifications (as suggested in the accompanying installation "pink sheets" ) were
made to run SAS under X windows.
The Computer Center staff and key users (such as Gail) extensively tested the SAS System under UNIX
before announcement. Speed was also
looked at.
2. Preparing for the presentation.
This included the following:
1. Developing a procedure to easily
migrate SAS datasets and
flat files from VMS to UNIX. (The transfer used the ftp TCP/IP
application.)
2. Purchasing copies of the SAS
companion and tech reports
to distribute to users.
3. Developing the presentation.
It included the following:
- Discussing the various ways to transport SAS datasets and flat files (including whole directories)
from VMS to UNIX.
- Discussing SAS under UNIX documentation
- Discussing the differences between
SAS on the two platforms.
- Discussing how to make SAS programs
UNIX-ready
- Reviewing the migration schedule.
All done in under two hours. An
accompanying SAS on UNIX course was also given.
The presentation raised some concerns with the users. The major one was the need to migrate
SAS datasets from VMS to UNIX because
this could no longer be done once
SAS was removed from VMS.
The migration
Once the presentation was given, the bulk of the work was now in the user's hands. (Namely the
migration of programs, datasets, and files.) Because
of specifying a n easy-to-use conversion method,
few questions came up on this topic.
Gail will address this topic later in the paper.
The future
I'm not sure what the future of SAS on SGI is. Currently, we are awaiting for SAS to appear on
IRIX 5.0. However, this will probably
not happen until sometime
in 1994. This release will also please Gail and others who have
a need for some procs available in the 6.08 SAS release on other
platforms.
We hope that this has been useful
introduction on the many aspects of migrating SAS to another operating
system (UNIX). We encourage others to
write migration papers on other platforms.
Getting in touch with us/Trademarks
Hallett German/Gail Gill
GTE Laboratories Inc, 40 Sylvan Road, Waltham, Ma 02254
SAS ® and all other SAS products mentioned is a registered trademark of the SAS Institute
UNIX® is a registered trademark of ATT
VAX, VMS, DCL, and DEC are trademarks
of the Digital Equipment Corporation.
References