As a SASŪ user, you are familiar with the power you can gain from SAS' data management capabilities. You have been involved in providing data and applications to support decision-making, and understand the benefits of having a consistent foundation from which to work. The foundations you have built combine current and historical operational data and enable the business to identify trends and predict outcomes.
It's likely, however, that your capability has grown organically as your experience with SAS has grown. This article aims to bring you up-to-date with new capabilities within the SASŪ Enterprise Intelligence Platform.
STRATEGIES FOR DATA INTEGRATION
Experience has shown that organisations need to adopt a strategy for data integration because they have a wide range of requirements to address, including the need to:
- Report on an operational level from a single database (operational reporting) and across multiple databases (data federation)
- Move data from one database to another (data migration)
- Co-ordinate records in databases (data synchronisation)
- Consistently store master reference data (master data management)
- Consolidate data from multiple databases (ETL) into a single view of customer, product, employees - allowing you to report, analyse, predict and optimise
Due to the breadth of capability required and the complexity of some of the tasks involved, data integration remains a major challenge for many organisations. In fact, analysts estimate that between 70 and 80% of all data integration solutions are still hand-coded. This often leads to programs that are difficult to maintain and requires deployment of significant resources to manage and execute. Tools are now available, however, to help ensure process efficiency and deliver the data quality the business demands.
NEW CAPABILITIES
To support your data integration strategy, new capabilities within the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform are designed to make your life easier in four key areas:
- Increased speed - up to 45% faster performance than SASŪ 8
- Greater consistency and accuracy - via a single metadata architecture
- Improved productivity through ease of use - via an optimised task interface
- Increased flexibility - grid deployment, customisable, etc.
"SAS enables you to manage consistent and trusted data across the enterprise," says Leigh Bates, Product Manager, SAS UK. "You can access, cleanse, integrate and manage growing data volumes more efficiently and cost-effectively - so you can spend more time delivering strategic value through the use of that data. SAS capabilities are directly mapped to overcoming the barriers to data integration, accelerating and increasing the return on investment from your information assets."
THE SASŪ ADVANTAGE
Rapid Development - tools include drag and drop wizards. SAS programs can also be packaged into re-usable transformations for distribution across teams.
ETL - extract, transform and load from multiple platforms and sources, a classic SAS benefit.
Data Quality - processing efficiency is maximised through integrated data quality routines to identify anomalies and initiate action to standardise, consolidate and match data.
Data Migration - with the introduction of new applications and upgrades, organisations need to migrate data from legacy applications. Data integration capabilities in SAS are a key driver of success in such projects.
Data Synchronisation - ensuring data consistency across many applications is a challenge. With SAS, synchronisation is an ongoing ETL process that occurs between operational systems.
Data Federation - SAS enables business users to integrate data from multiple sources into a single virtual view; data remains at the source while the virtual integrated view stays in memory, to be queried as needed, so removing the storage overhead.
Leigh Bates adds, "The latest SAS solutions bring a new level of control and accountability to all aspects of data integration: from auto-generated audit trails of changes over a project lifecycle, to easy-to-use metadata management and a single administrative window into information systems.
The bottom line is that the SASŪ Data Integration Solution is fast, accurate, simple and flexible, allowing you to make the most of your data assets to fuel effective decision making across the organisation.
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Learn more at www.sas.com/uk/technologies/dw
