Products & Solutions / Foundation Tools

SAS® Scalable Performance Data Server®

A data storage system optimized to deliver data subsets quickly and on demand

SAS® Scalable Performance Data Server® delivers subsets of information harvested from large stores of enterprise data, quickly and on demand. The solution ensures that business intelligence and analytic applications maintain consistent performance and that extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) processes do not exceed the time windows that are available.

Benefits

  • Quickly gather subset of enterprise data for analysis.
  • Optimize the performance of business intelligence and analytic applications.
  • Reduce extraction, transformation and loading times, irrespective of data size.

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Features

  • Partitioning and parallel processing
  • Unique indexing technology
  • Query optimization
  • SQL Pass-Through support
  • Management and security

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How SAS® Is Different

  • Data storage system that is optimized to quickly load and retrieve subsets of data. Large-scale business intelligence and analytic applications will benefit from the swift access to de­tail data stored in this server.
  • Speeds the processing of large amounts of data by partitioning the data across multiple disks and I/O channels. This enables parallelization of many SAS I/O functions over multiple data partitions.

Benefits

  • Quickly gather subset of enterprise data for analysis. SAS Scalable Performance Data Server uses parallel storage technologies and hardware to reduce overhead, such as the two-phase commit, which is incurred with transactional systems. This significantly shortens search and delivery times.
  • Optimize the performance of business intelligence and analytic applications. By separating the transactional data store from the business intelligence and analytic application data stores, each can be tuned for the appropriate task requirements. You get better performance for reporting and analyses while reducing the load on operational systems.
  • Reduce extraction, transformation and loading times, irrespective of data size. An integrated ETL process moves data from transactional systems to the SAS Scalable Performance Data Server, reducing ETL times and allowing data and indexes to be refreshed rapidly. Integrated metadata ensures data consistency and reduces the time spent maintaining vast quantities of data.

Features

Partitioning and parallel processing
  • Partitions across multiple CPUs, I/O channels and disks.
  • Supports the dynamic clustering of tables with identical structures.
  • Utilizes parallel CPUs and I/O for summarizations.
  • Supports the use of table aliases.
  • Integrates into the SAS SQL engine.
  • Provides multithreaded WHERE clause processing.
  •  Evaluates subsetting criteria via WHERE clause planning.
  • Supports full table scans where no indexes are defined.
  • Launches multiple threads to process different portions of a table simultaneously.
  • Evaluates strategies for query processing to determine the least resource-intensive option via WHERE planner costing.
Unique indexing technology
  • Combines the best features of B-tree indexes and bitmap indexes by using a hybrid bitmap index.
  • Analyzes each table and determines the best indexing option.
  • Builds and updates multiple indexes with a single read of a data table.
  • Maintains a table of statistics about indexes.
Query optimization
  • Provides star-schema optimization, and parallel and optimized join methods for non-star-schema data models.
  • Uses transparent restructuring and recoding of nested SQL code to create temporary tables “on the fly” for accelerated processing.
  • Performs fast sorting on BY statements.
  • Sorts on subsets of data identified with a WHERE clause or KEEP list. 
  • Creates single sort bins larger than 2GB to reduce the number of bins needed to complete the sort.
SQL Pass-Through support
  • Sends server-specific SQL statements directly to the server for execution.
  • Triggers multiple, independent SQL statements for parallel execution.
Management and security
  • Handles large numbers of users and increasing amounts of data.
  • Offers dynamic cluster tables for enhanced manageability and scalability of large tables.
  • Allocates and addresses more than 2GB of memory at a time by using 64-bit, wide-mode support.
  • Provides a sophisticated security implementation that gives administrators read, write and modification access to tables on a per-user and per-group basis.
  • Ensures data integrity and consistency throughout the business intelligence and analytic application life cycle via a common metadata framework.

System Requirements

Server environment

SAS servers, including Base SAS and SAS Metadata Server, can be installed on one or more hardware systems in a multitier configuration.

  • AIX (64-bit): Release 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 on POWER
  • HP/UX PA-RISC: Release 11i, Version 1, 2 and 3
  • HP/UX Itanium: Release 11i, Version 1, 2 and 3
  • Linux for x86 (x86-32): Red Hat Linux 8.0, RHAS 2.1, RHEL 3.0 and 4.0, SuSE SLES 8 and 9 (SAS Scalable Performance Data Server "client only" platform)
  • Solaris on SPARC: Version 8, 9, 10 on SPARC
  • Solaris on x64: Version 10, Update 3
  • Windows (x86-32): Windows NT 4 Server, Windows 200 Server, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional
  • Windows (64-bit on Itanium): Windows Server 2003 (SAS Scalable Performance Data Server client-only platform)
Required software
  • Base SAS®

Please contact your SAS representative with any additional questions about technical requirements.

Ready to learn more?

Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.