The Uses of SAS/CONNECT in the SAS Intelligence Platform

Introduction to SAS/CONNECT explains the general capabilities that SAS/CONNECT gives SAS programmers. This section explains how some of the SAS Intelligence Platform clients and some of the SAS macros that are provided with the platform use SAS/CONNECT. You must install SAS/CONNECT on the correct machines (and possibly configure a SAS/CONNECT spawner and server) to use the following features: For more information about providing the infrastructure for these features, see the following sections.

If you have installed and configured SAS/CONNECT, then both SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner can generate SAS/CONNECT code as part of a job. For example, suppose that you are creating a SAS Data Integration Studio job that processes a large amount of remote data. Instead of sending requests for data across the network and results being returned across the network to you, the job can use SAS/CONNECT compute services to submit the code that does the processing to a SAS/CONNECT server that is running on the remote machine, as shown in the following figure.

Because the code is now executing on the machine where the data resides, the job can execute much faster.

Alternatively, the job can use the data transfer service in SAS/CONNECT to download the data from the remote host so that the job can run on the local processor. If necessary, the job can also upload revised data.

For complete details about how to set up your environment in order to enable this functionality, see Setting Up Multi-Tier Environments in SAS Intelligence Platform: Desktop Application Adminstration Guide. For information about creating data integration and data mining jobs, see the user's guides and online Help for SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner.

If you have invested in the SAS Grid Manager software application, then users of SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Miner can use SAS/CONNECT not only to submit code to a remote host, but to submit code to a grid of processors. The following figure illustrates the role that SAS/CONNECT plays in grid computing.

The illustration is designed to give you an idea of how this type of system is set up. For more information, see What Is SAS Grid Computing? in Grid Computing in SAS.