SAS Access Reviews

The solution is an access module that allows connections to external databases, such as Oracle, with a side base, with an Ingres informing, SAP, or Oracle financials. The native interfaces with a graphical user interface allow direct navigation of the other databases.

The most valuable feature is you have native access to the external databases.

You can run user applications on the Oracle database with these Access tools with complete transparency, without knowing that you have an Oracle system below that.

The solution is primarily used for just accessing different databases including Oracle, Microsoft Access, and Single Server. They're just database connectors, basically.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ease of access to the data in those databases.

It's pretty basic. You just install and then you can use it to access the databases with usernames and passwords and things like that.

The company I worked for needed to use SAS/ACCESS to connect to various database platforms within the company. While I have not worked with any customers where they need SAS scripting or SAS administrative support or environment design, up until the present I was using SAS (Statistical Analysis System) and SAS/ACCESS a lot to resolve access issues.  

I currently work for a consultancy and we do a lot of different things. Primarily we help customers from two perspectives: a project-oriented perspective or an evaluation and white paper perspective. This is to help evaluate where they are within their DevOps concepts or structures. We either help them move a project through a DevOps oriented environment or shift them to cloud or give them an evaluation of what their DevOps scenario currently looks like.  

I just joined the company I currently work for back in late September of 2018. In the company previous to that, I worked in data warehousing almost exclusively on-premises doing database design across multiple platforms. We did everything from your standard RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) to massive parallel processing projects using several different ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tools like IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Ab Initio, and Sagent. I have also used some of the SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Services) solutions, but not a whole lot.  

Before I left the company I was at, I was working as a primary SAS administrator and environment design for SAS processing and financial analysis.  

The primary need was to connect to various databases within the company. This included connections to the enterprise warehouse but also to transactional systems and the data stores behind the transactional systems. At the time that I started there, what they were doing was actually forcing those transactional systems to export a CSV data file. Then the business customers would actually manually read that data file with SAS code. By giving them SAS/ACCESS and working out the necessary permissions to query databases, they basically could start using PROC SQL (SQL implementation within the SAS System), so they had direct connectivity to data. It no longer required the extra steps of somebody writing a job to export data at a particular time and then moving it from one system to another. That was inefficient. With SAS/ACCESS, we established the database connectivity, established the ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) connection, and off we went.  

SAS/ACCESS improved the company I was working for by streamlining database access issues, trimming inefficiency, and creating self-sufficiency for those needing access to data.