The LASR procedure is used to start, stop, and load and unload tables from a distributed SAS LASR Analytic Server. The LASR procedure can also be used to save in-memory tables to HDFS.

The LASR procedure can transfer data from any data source that SAS can read and load it into memory on the SAS LASR Analytic Server. However, the LASR procedure can also be used to make the server read data from a co-located data provider. The HDFS that is part of SAS High-Performance Deployment of Hadoop provides a co-located data provider. When the data is co-located, each machine that is used by the server instance reads the portion of the data that is local. Because the read is local and because the machines read in parallel, very large tables are read quickly.

In order to read tables from a third-party vendor database, the client machine must be configured with the native database client software and the SAS/ACCESS Interface software for the database.