The SAS Data in
HDFS engine is used to distribute data in the
Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) that is provided by SAS High-Performance Deployment of Hadoop.
The engine enables you to distribute the data in a format that is
designed for high-performance analytics. The block redundancy and
distributed computing provided by SAS High-Performance Deployment of Hadoop is complemented
by the block structure that is created with the engine.
The engine is designed to distribute data in HDFS only. Because the data volumes in HDFS are typically very large, the engine
is not designed to read from HDFS and transfer
data back to the SAS client. For example, consider the case of reading several terabytes of data from a distributed computing
environment, transferring that data back to a SAS session, and then using the UNIVARIATE or REG procedures on such a large
volume of data. In contrast, the SAS High-Performance Analytics procedures are designed to operate in a distributed computing
environment and to read data in parallel from a
co-located data provider like SAS High-Performance Deployment of Hadoop.