SAS Visual Analytics: FAQ (Updated 1/2014)

SAS charged its sales force with selling 2,000 licenses for Visual Analytics in 2013; the jury is still out on whether they met this target.  There’s lots of marketing action lately from SAS about this product, so here’s an FAQ.

Update:  SAS recently announced 1,400 sites licensed for Visual Analytics.  In SAS lingo, a site corresponds roughly to one machine, but one license can include multiple sites; so the actual number of licenses sold in 2013 is less than 1,400.  In April 2013 SAS executives claimed two hundred customers for the product.   In contrast, Tableau reports that it added seven thousand customers in 2013 bringing its total customer count to 17,000.

What is SAS Visual Analytics?

Visual Analytics is an in-memory visualization and reporting tool.

What does Visual Analytics do?

SAS Visual Analytics creates reports and graphs that are visually compelling.  You can view them on mobile devices.

VA is now in its fifth dot release.  Why do they call it Release 6.3?

SAS Worldwide Marketing thinks that if they call it Release 6.3, you will think it’s a mature product.  It’s one of the games software companies play.

Is Visual Analytics an in-memory database, like SAP HANA?

No.  HANA is a standards-based in-memory database that runs on many different brands of hardware and supports a range of end-user tools.  VA is a proprietary architecture available on a limited choice of hardware platforms.  It cannot support anything other than the end-user applications SAS chooses to develop.

What does VA compete with?

SAS claims that Visual Analytics competes with Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire.  Internally, SAS leadership refers to the product as its “Tableau-killer” but as the reader can see from the update at the top of this page, Tableau is alive and well.

How well does it compare?

You will have to decide for yourself whether VA reports are prettier than those produced by Tableau, Qlikview or Spotfire.  On paper, Tableau has more functionality.

VA runs in memory.  Does that make it better than conventional BI?

All analytic applications perform computations in memory.  Tableau runs in memory, and so does Base SAS.   There’s nothing unique about that.

What makes VA different from conventional BI applications is that it loads the entire fact table into memory.  By contrast, BI applications like Tableau query a back-end database to retrieve the necessary data, then perform computations on the result set.

Performance of a conventional BI application depends on how fast the back-end database can retrieve the data.  With a high-performance database the performance is excellent, but in most cases it won’t be as fast as it would if the data were held in memory.

So VA is faster?  Is there a downside?

There are two.

First, since conventional BI systems don’t need to load the entire fact table into memory, they can support usage with much larger datastores.  The largest H-P Proliant box for VA maxes out at about 10 terabytes; the smallest Netezza appliance supports 30 terabytes, and scales to petabytes.

The other downside is cost; memory is still much more expensive than other forms of storage, and the machines that host VA are far more expensive than data warehouse appliances that can host far more data.

VA is for Big Data, right?

SAS and H-P appear to be having trouble selling VA in larger sizes, and are positioning a small version that can handle 75-100 Gigabytes of data.  That’s tiny.

The public references SAS has announced for this product don’t seem particularly large.  See below.

How does data get into VA?

VA can load data from a relational database or from a proprietary SASHDAT file.  SAS cautions that loading data from a relational database is only a realistic option when VA is co-located in a Teradata Model 720 or Greenplum DCA appliance.

To use SASHDAT files, you must first create them using SAS.

Does VA work with unstructured data?

VA works with structured data, so unstructured data must be structured first, then loaded either to a co-located relational database or to SAS’ proprietary SASHDAT format.

Unlike products like Datameer or IBM Big Sheets, VA does not support “schema on read”, and it lacks built-in tools for parsing unstructured text.

But wait, SAS says VA works with Hadoop.  What’s up with that?

A bit of Marketing slight-of-hand.  VA can load SASHDAT files that are stored in the Hadoop File System (HDFS); but first, you have to process the data in SAS, then load it back into HDFS.  In other words, you can’t visualize and write reports from the data that streams in from machine-generated sources — the kind of live BI that makes Hadoop really cool.  You have to batch the data, parse it, structure it, then load it with SAS to VA’s staging area.

Can VA work with streaming data?

SAS sells tools that can capture streaming data and load it to a VA data source, but VA works with structured data at rest only.

With VA, can my users track events in real time?

Don’t bet on it.   To be usable VA requires significant pre-processing before it is loaded into VA’s memory.  Moreover, once it is loaded it can’t be updated; updating the data in VA requires a full truncate and reload.   Thus, however fast VA is in responding to user requests, your users won’t be tracking clicks on their iPads in real time; they will be looking at yesterday’s data.

Does VA do predictive analytics?

Visual Analytics 6.1 can perform correlation, fit bivariate trend lines to plots and do simple forecasting.  That’s no better than Tableau.  Surprisingly, given the hype, Tableau actually supports more analysis functions.

While SAS claims that VA is better than SAP HANA because “HANA is just a database”, the reality is that SAP supports more analytics through its Predictive Analytics Library than SAS supports in VA.

Has anyone purchased VA?

A SAS executive claimed 200 customers in early 2013, a figure that should be taken with a grain of salt.  If there are that many customers for this product, they are hiding.

There are five public references, all of them outside the US:

SAS has also recently announced selection (but not implementation) by

OfficeMax has also purchased the product, according to this SAS blog.

As of January 2014, the four customers who announced selection or purchase are not cited as reference customers.

What about implementation?  This is an appliance, right?

Wrong.  SAS’ considers an implementation that takes a month to be wildly successful.  Implementation tasks include the same tasks you would see in any other BI project, such as data requirements, data modeling, ETL construction and so forth.  All of the back end feeds must be built to put data into a format that VA can load.

Bottom line, does it make sense to buy SAS Visual Analytics?

Again, you will have to decide for yourself whether the SAS VA reports look better than Tableau or the many other options in this space.  BI beauty shows are inherently subjective.

You should also demand that SAS prove its claims to performance in a competitive POC.  Despite the theoretical advantage of an in-memory architecture, actual performance is influenced by many factors.  Visitors to the recent Gartner BI Summit who witnessed a demo were unimpressed; one described it to me as “dog slow”.  She didn’t mean that as a compliment.

The high cost of in-memory platforms mean that VA and its supporting hardware will be much more expensive for any given quantity of data than Tableau or equivalent products. Moreover, its proprietary architecture means you will be stuck with a BI silo in your organization unless you are willing to make SAS your exclusive BI provider.  That makes this product very good for SAS; the question is whether it is good for you.

The early adopters for this product appear to be very SAS-centric organizations (with significant prior SAS investment).  They also appear to be fairly small.  If you have very little data, money to burn and are willing to experiment with a relatively new product, VA may be for you.

Advertisement

75 thoughts on “SAS Visual Analytics: FAQ (Updated 1/2014)”

  1. I just finished up a SAS VA proof-of-concept. What a total waste of time. This post touches on no more than about 10% of the problems we had with this product.

    Reply

  2. Zathras,

    Sorry about the wasted time. Would love to hear more about the issues you encountered — drop me a note or post in the comments if you have a few minutes to share.

    Reply

  3. Not everything, but some highlights:

    (1) data registry requirement — the problems here are worse than you think, starting with the fact that in certain cases if the data is modified, it has to be re-registered

    (2) lack of customization in graphs, including inability to
    -rescale graphs
    -restrict graphing to a portion of the data without an explicit query, so you can’t remove outliers from graphs, either manually or automatically

    (3) no clustering

    (4) deployment of results in VA is painful

    (5) no multivariate regression

    (6) you mention a max dataset size of 75-100 GB. This is off by an order of magnitude, in the wrong direction. We couldn’t get 10GB to work.

    Reply

  4. Zathras,

    Thank you. SAS claims to be able to load a 75-100GB table when VA is installed on a 16 core commodity server with 256GB of RAM. Was your POC environment comparable to that?

    Reply

  5. Thanks for the blog post. Just curious, could you send a copy of the original paper from the HP engineer regarding the implementation?

    Reply

  6. Thx for the blog post. Can i get also a copy of the original paper from the HP engineer ?

    Reply

      1. Hello. I’d also like copy of the original HP paper if possible.
        Thank you in Advance!

        Yex

  11. Hello!
    I definitely enjoyed the read. I’d be very interested in the original paper if possible. We currently use a combination of IBI and Tableau for reporting/visualization, and we’re looking at SAS for possible predictive analytics. They framed VA as “all the visualization of Tableau, but with more in-depth analytics built in”. But from the blog post above, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

    Reply

      1. Hi thomson

        Info mentioned by you is incorrect. The doc link you gave actually mentions predictive capabilities of visual analytics.

        Sas visual analytics does support predictive analytics with the likes of forecasting with statistical scenario analysis, decision trees for segmentation, network analysis to understand chain along with social media analytics integration. This also suppports various capabilities like custom categories, affinity analysis, correlation and regression analytics.

        It also does support incremental data uploads and also includes basic etc. You have an option to work with enterprise guide for extended etl.

        On the data volumes, my personal experience has been with 24 gb of data ..70 million records with 83 cols. Works well.

        On hardware front, it wotks on commodity hardware and hence less expensive.

        Tco compared to other bi tools is low when looking at 3 years tco.

      2. Santosh,

        Thanks for reading. Now go back and read the post again, this time more carefully. It says that VA 6.1 can perform a few light statistical functions, but no more than Tableau. That statement is true as written, and is still true for VA 6.4.

        While it’s true that SAS added decision trees to VA 6.3, your statement that VA includes “network analysis to understand chain along with social media analytics integration…affinity analysis…and regression analytics” is not supported by SAS documentation. You may be confusing VA with another SAS product, Visual Statistics, that uses the same LASR Server back end.

        “Incremental data uploads” and table updates are two different things.

        24GB of data fits on a thumb drive. Which confirms what I’ve said elsewhere — VA is great for SAS-centric organizations that do not need to work with Big Data.

        “Commodity hardware” is a loosely defined term. HP recommends specially configured hardware for VA

        http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04222517

      1. Hello Thomas,

        Nice reading. Do you have some recommendations when migrating from Web Report Studio to VA?
        Could you also send me the HP paper, please?

        Best regards,
        Fernando.

  16. I’d be interested in the HP original paper and if there is some similar documentation about the new version 71.

    Thanks for you attention

    Reply

  18. Interesting reading and thanks for taking the time to put together. I’d be interested to see the original HP paper if you could please send it over. Thanks, HD

    Reply

  20. Hi,

    Thank you for a very informative and insightful blog. I am doing some research with the SAS VA installation and the potential ROI. I would really like to know if there are any challenges I should know beforehand. Can you please mail me the original copy of the paper?

    Thank you for your attention!

    Reply

  24. Thomas – Would be thankful if you could send me the original HP paper. I need to show POC on SAS BI and SAS VA. I wanted to know whether both can be configure on 1 server (Windows Server 2012 R2) for POC purpose.

    Reply

    1. Sent, but the paper does not address that issue. Yes, it is possible to deploy SAS VA in a single server, but why would you want to? The whole point of SAS’ distributed in-memory architecture is that it enables you to spread the workload across multiple servers, which BI cannot do.

      Reply

  30. I happened to be a pathetic VA user before reading your awesome articles. Could you share me the HP paper? Thanks.

    Reply
  31. Pingback: How to Buy SAS Visual Analytics | The Big Analytics Blog

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.