Content Assessment delivers utility applications to support SAS Viya Content Migration

1 Like

Content Assessment is a collection of applications designed to help you understand various characteristics of your SAS 9.4 deployment. SAS Content Assessment is being updated every month to match the Viya development efforts in the area of migration from SAS 9.4 to Viya. Recent development has added new applications to Content Assessment which extend its capabilities beyond the assessment of a SAS 9.4 environment and begin to assist with the execution of migration to SAS Viya. In this post, I will look at these new applications

Content Assessment is available as a download from support.sas.com. The download contains the installation and usage documentation which is also available in the Migration section of the SAS Viya Administration guide.

The following resources provide more information on the "assessment" side Content Assessment:

In this post, we will look at the "migration" applications which can be split into two categories, those that assist with export from SAS 9.4, and those that assist with import to Viya.

Export applications

There is currently one application that helps with exporting from SAS 9.4. The createSASPackages application creates SAS packages (.spk files) for SAS objects that you intend to migrate from SAS 9 to SAS Viya.

Requirements to use createSASPackages. The SAS Content Assessment must be installed on the same machine as

SAS 9.4 Foundation
SAS 9.4 Platform Object Framework

The application currently supports Data Integration Studio jobs. Using the "SAS 9 Profile for SAS Data Integration Report" created by the ProfileContent application, you can create a CSV file of jobs that can then be input to the createSASPackages application.

Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.

The createSASPackages application creates SAS packages for each object in the CSV. The packages are output in the location set in the parameter ASSESSMENT_PACKAGES_OUTPUT_LOCATION set in the setenv.yaml file.

createSASPackages.exe --source-file "D:\\workshop\\94packages\\Jobs ready for migration or not.csv"

Each job that is referenced in the CSV file, and any dependent objects, are exported to a .spk file.

Import applications

There are two import applications importEGProjects and importSASPackages.

importEGProjects imports SAS Enterprise Guide projects on the file system to SAS Viya 4.
importSASPackages imports SAS packages containing SAS Enterprise Guide projects and SAS Data Integration Studio jobs to SAS Viya 4.

These applications are used in conjunction with the SAS Viya Command-Line interface(CLI). They are a little different than the rest of the Content Assessment applications in that they do not access the SAS 9.4 environment. Instead, they read files (.spk and .egp) from the file system and, using the transfer plug-in of the SAS Viya CLI to import the content of those files to SAS Viya.

Requirements to use the import applications:

installed on the same machine as the SAS Viya CLI (minimum release 1.7.11)
the SAS Viya CLI must include at a minimum the 1.20.0 release of the transfer plug-in.
can access the Viya environment
can access the directory with the SAS Package files and/or Enterprise Guide projects.

These applications are really stand-alone applications delivered with the Content Assessment Utility they are installed in the migration sub-directory of the Content Assessment install directory. They can be used independently of any Content Assessment analysis (NOTE: To use the CSV import you need a CSV file in the format created by the Content Assessment reports).

Using the importEGProjects application there are two ways to specify which projects to import. You can use a CSV file downloaded from the Content Assessment Reports or you can reference the EG projects directly.

Use --source-location to specify the path to a directory containing SAS Enterprise Guide projects. You can optionally specify a base directory to store the EG projects (the default directory is "SAS Content> ConvertedEGProjects").

./importEGProjects.exe --sas-viya-path "D:\\ViyaHome\\CLI\\sas-viya.exe" --source-location "D:\workshop\gelcorp\finance\projects"

Check out this article to see more details on using importEGProjects with the output of the Content Assessment reports. ImportPackages works in exactly the same way except the --source-location should point to a directory that includes SAS packages.

Summary

Content Assessment now delivers additional applications that can assist with the execution phase of a migration.

createSASPackages application creates SAS packages (.spk files) for SAS objects that you intend to migrate from SAS 9 to SAS Viy
importEGProjects imports SAS Enterprise Guide projects on the file system to SAS Viya 4.
importSASPackages imports SAS packages containing SAS Enterprise Guide projects and SAS Data Integration Studio jobs to SAS Viya 4.

I encourage you to take a look at Content Assessment on a regular basis as new features are delivered every month (this post was originally based on 2021.1.5). You can see what has changed in the Version History section of the documentation.

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.