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

Mail to Hal

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