Introduction to SAS/CONNECT

SAS/CONNECT provides applications with three types of services:

The following sections describe these services briefly. For detailed information, see SAS/CONNECT: Definitions and Services in SAS/CONNECT User's Guide.

The compute services of SAS/CONNECT enable the use of multiple local processors and remote computing resources"including hardware, software, and data"to most efficiently execute an application.

You can move any or all portions of an application's processing to other processors (either local or remote) in order to use hardware resources, use software in remote environments, interface with legacy systems, and execute code against a remote copy of the data. The results of the remote processing can be returned to the local machine. This is useful when the remote machine has hardware or software that can perform a particular task most efficiently.

Compute services are also helpful if the amount of data to be processed is too large to move to the local machine or if the data is updated too frequently for a local static copy of be useful.

The data transfer services of SAS/CONNECT provide a method for moving a copy of data from one machine to another where a physical copy is then created. Subsequent local processing takes place against the local copy of the data without generating further network traffic until you decide to update the original copy with another transfer. Data transfer services automatically perform any conversion or translation necessary to move data, such as from one SAS release to another or from one machine representation to another. These services can move data stored in SAS data sets, external databases, and external files.

The remote library services of SAS/CONNECT provide access to remote data libraries as if they were stored locally. The data moves through the network only as the local program requests it. A copy of the data is not written to the local files system, and the data must pass through the network on subsequent use by the local processor. This enables you to maintain a single copy of your data and build applications that provide seemingly identical access to local and remote data without requiring the user to know where the data resides.