What's New in SAS Federation Server

Tables located on SAS SPD Server can be accessed for reading, writing, and update by SAS Federation Server with the SAS Federation Server Driver for SPD Server (Driver for SPD Server). The Driver for SPD Server provides connectivity from a SAS Federation Server on any host to an SPD server running anywhere. The Driver for SPD Server integrates with UNIX hosts as well as Windows. See SAS Federation Server Driver for SAS Scalable Performance Data (SPD) Server .

SAS Metadata Server replaces DataFlux Authentication Server as the authentication provider. SAS Metadata Server provides access for user and group objects, as well as other permission-based functions such as shared logins and trusted users. SAS Federation Server objects are populated from objects created in SAS Metadata Server. There is no longer a need to create federation server objects in SAS Federation Server Manager. See the SAS Federation Server: Administrator’s Guide for information about how SAS Federation Server works with SAS Metadata Server.

DS2 is a SAS proprietary programming language that is used for advanced data manipulation. DS2 provides capabilities not available through SQL, such as scoring models. You can also use DS2 code to run data quality functions using SAS Federation Server Manager.

New data masking features include TRANC, which transliterates characters from the input string to characters in the output string. A series of random data masking rules are also available. See the Data Masking Rule Types and Arguments for information about each of these new rules and their functionality in SAS Federation Server Manager.

Federation Server now has the capability of refreshing cached data in MDS after a server restart. In previous releases, cached data that was held in memory was deleted if the server was restarted or shut down. Now the cache held in memory is retained and refreshed at server restart by default. See the SET RESTART='REFRESH' option in the CREATE CACHE statement for details. Also see “Data Caching” for additional information about creating a cache table.

The new data quality and cleansing is implemented using SAS Quality Knowledge Base (QKB) with FedSQL and DS2. The data quality methods use data quality rules from the SAS QKB in order to cleanse data. The SAS Quality Knowledge Base (QKB) is a collection of files that store data and logic that define data management operations such as parsing, standardization, and matching. SAS software products refer to the QKB when performing data management operations, also referred to as data cleansing, on your data. See “Data Quality for SAS Federation Server” for additional information.

SAS Federation Server supports big data with the SAS Federation Server Driver for Apache Hive (Driver for Hive). The Driver for Hive enables SAS Federation Server to query and manage large data sets that reside in distributed storage. The Driver for Hive supports multiple versions of Hadoop. See About the SAS Federation Server Driver for Apache Hive. for additional information including configuration and connection options.

You can now share data sources across multiple SAS Federation Servers with the new federation server driver (FEDSVR). The driver enables you to define a connection from one SAS Federation Server to another SAS Federation Server. This connectivity can be useful for distributing work load or to federate data between various federation servers. See “About the Federation Server Driver” for additional information including configuration and connection options.