The
engine and the LASR procedure are similar in that you can use them
to load tables to memory in a SAS LASR Analytic Server instance.
You can also use the engine and the procedure to unload tables from
memory.
You can use the engine
with the APPEND= data set option to add data to an existing table.
The procedure cannot modify the data.
You cannot use the engine
to load tables into memory from HDFS. Only the LASR procedure can
be used to load tables into memory from HDFS.
You
can use the LASR procedure to save in-memory tables to HDFS. The procedure
writes the data in parallel because the server instance uses SAS High-Performance Deployment of Hadoop
as a co-located data provider.
You can use the engine
to supply a libref to SAS procedures or DATA steps. However, be aware
that if you use the engine as an input data source, the data volume
can be large. Large data volumes can overwhelm the SAS session.