Planning Your Migration
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Migration Planning Worksheet
The Migration focus area at support.sas.com/rnd/migration provides detailed information about SAS migration and cross-release compatibility. The idea is to document every known issue together with their fixes and best practices. This gives the customer a sense of confidence that possible obstacles have been anticipated and resolved ahead of time. With proper planning, the site's resources can be maximized, the migration can proceed more smoothly, and the customer can start using the enhanced power of a new SAS release.
Because SAS installations can vary so widely, it is not possible for SAS to provide a one-size-fits-all migration timeline. Instead, this document is a framework for your research and planning.
The first two steps help you to collect basic information about your site. Then you use our interactive calculators to learn whether you need the MIGRATE procedure and how to use it. The remaining steps alert you to possible issues that can affect your migration timeline. A number of SAS employees in the field helped to gather information from customer sites, so this document includes a variety of possible issues. You should be able to cross off many of them as not applicable.
Step 1: Inventory the Hardware
This step gathers information about your current operating environment and target operating environment. Note any necessary upgrades as tasks in your migration plan. You will also need this information in step 3.
- On what hardware is SAS running now? Be sure to include servers and desktops. You might be running on multiple operating environments.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/platform/inventory.html) - Is the operating environment supported in your target SAS release? Are you changing to a different oeprating environment? Are you changing from 32-bit SAS to 64-bit SAS?
(support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/) - Are you staying on the same machine?
- Read the system requirements for the target environment. Do you need to perform operating environment updates?
(support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/) - Read the system requirements for the target environment. Do you need to update or change any third-party software?
(support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/) - What operating environment issues do you need to watch for? If you upgrade hardware,
see especially issues that can arise from an operating environment change.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/platform/os.html) - If performance is crucial to your applications, do you need an
operating environment expert for debugging and optimization tuning?
- Any client-server or n-tier architecture issues?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/platform/inventory.html)
Step 2: Inventory the Files
This step gathers information about existing data files. In step 3 you will decide whether to migrate data files to the new release.
- Locate SAS data libraries.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/execution/special_findingnotmvs.html) - Take an inventory of the libraries you will need to access after you upgrade SAS.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/inventory.html) - What members are in each library?
- Under what version of SAS were the files created?
- Files that were created under different SAS versions could be stored together.
Are all library members from the same release? All libraries from the same release?
- Under what operating environment were the files created?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/bestcompat.html#proccontents) - If you want to use cross-environment compatibility rather than migrating libraries to the newer release, determine what kind of processing you need - input (read), update (modify), output (create).
- If you want to use cross-environment compatibility, do you need access to
SAS catalogs, indexes, integrity constraints, DATA step views, SAS/ACCESS views that are not for SAS/ACCESS for Oracle or SAP, stored compiled DATA step programs, item stores, DMDB files, FDB files, or any SAS file that was created prior to SAS 7?
- Are you changing to a different character encoding in the target SAS release?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/bestcompat.html#attributes) - Do you need any new file features that are available only by migrating data to the target SAS release?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/forward.html) - (Not common) Do you need to migrate any files not covered by PROC MIGRATE?
How will you move them to
the target installation?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/execution/special_notcovered.html) - (Not common) Do you have any SAS 8.2 files that were created in 32-bit SAS under HP-UX, Solaris, or AIX?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/bestcompat.html#proccontents) - (Not common) Do you have any SAS 8.2 files that were created under Windows with short extensions?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/execution/special_shortfileext.html)
Step 3: Use the Calculators and Prepare to Migrate Files
For this step, you'll need the answers to the questions above in steps 1 and 2.
- Use the
Compatibility Calculator
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/calculator/) to decide whether to migrate
SAS libraries to the format of your target SAS release.
- Use the
PROC MIGRATE Calculator
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/migratecalc/)
to get the proper migration instructions and example code for your operating environment and
SAS library members.
- The MOVE option is not recommended with PROC MIGRATE.
Do you have enough disk space to validate the
migration in the target library before you delete the source library?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/validtools.html) - The migration instructions will tell you whether you need to use
RLS, a feature of SAS/SHARE and SAS/CONNECT software. If you don't have access
to SAS/SHARE or SAS/CONNECT software, contact the Customer Interaction Center
(phone 1-800-727-0025 or send e-mail to CICenter@sas.com).
- Do you need to migrate ODS templates?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/execution/special_odstemplates.html) - Review the PROC MIGRATE documentation to answer any questions.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/index.html) - Perform a small, sample migration to test your syntax.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/execution/migrate_2.html#test) - Review the compatibility documentation to answer any questions. This page is a gateway to in-depth compatibility topics.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/files/compatibility.html)
Step 4: Inventory the SAS Products and Applications
This step focuses on software concerns rather than data compatibility.
- What SAS products do you use?
(Blog post: How to document your SAS environment) - Do you have compatibility or migration issues in any of your SAS products?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/software/index.html) - Do you need to update SAS and SCL code for your target SAS release?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/software/programs.html) - Can you reengineer any processes to take advantange of enhanced features or new products in your target SAS release?
(support.sas.com/documentation/whatsnew/index.html) - Do you need to run multiple releases of SAS products and applications on one machine?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/papers/peaceful.html) - Do you have globalization concerns?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/nls/index.html) - Do you have pharmaceutical industry concerns?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/industry/industry_pharma.html) - Is validation a concern? Can you use the SAS OQ and SAS IQ? Any other QA or custom validation needed?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/validation/index.html) - Are isolated environments or dev-test-prod necessary for validation before going production?
Do you need extra disk space, CPU time, peaceful coexistence, or live update?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/validation/parallel.html)
Step 5: Inventory the Roles and Timeline
This step helps you to allocate the needed resources for your migration plan.
- Read through the typical migration execution tasks.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/procmigrate/execution/index.html) - Consider the suggested
roles for the migration project team - providers and customers within your organization.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/scheduling/roles_inventory.html) - Create a timeline that includes all the migration tasks and contingencies.
Assign tasks to team members.
- Have you accounted for these often-overlooked needs in your timeline?
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/scheduling/needs_drilldown.html)- Do users need help to migrate their libraries?
- How will you minimize downtime?
- Do you have interdepartmental and workflow dependencies?
- Do you have dependencies between SAS and third-party software?
- Determine the batch SAS jobs that are regularly scheduled. Who or what depends on the
results from those jobs?
- If you need to migrate in stages, how does that impact the dependencies?
- Do any service-level agreements exist within your organization, or from your organization to clients?
- Have you planned for roll-back, a safety net?
- Do users need training for migration or for your target SAS release?
- Do users need help to migrate their libraries?
Step 6: Review the Plan and Timeline
- Consider the best practices and guidance provided by SAS employees in SAS Global Forum papers.
(support.sas.com/rnd/migration/papers/index.html) - Review your decisions and your timeline. This is advisable because many planning decisions are interdependent; that is, one decision can affect multiple areas of planning.