SAS 9.3 was released at July 2011 when I former company just successfully launched an upgrading to SAS 9.2. SAS 9.2 came to life at March 2008 (it’s a big leap) and at that time I played with SAS 9.1.3 heavily. Yesterday(10Jul2013) was the official release day for SAS 9.4 while I just got my SAS 9.3 installed at this March!
Based on historical data, I will probably play with SAS 9.4 in 2014. For me, its most exciting parts:
- My favorite ODS Report Writing Interface as production
- New ODS destinations, ODS HTML5 and ODS Epub
- A new language, DS2
- Another flavor of SQL, FedSQL
- Metadata-Bound Libraries
- Metadata server clusters
- SAS Environment Manager (vs SAS Management Console?)
- No troublesome JBoss, WebSphere, or WebLogic required anymore as web application server! It is said that “SAS 9.4 includes an embedded middle-tier server called SAS Web Application Server”(which is based on Tomcat) and it will definitely simplify the SAS deployment process(good or bad news for me as a SAS consultant?). It’s nice to have another option as a SAS user.