How to run SAS using batch if I do not have it locally

Question

Is there a way to run SAS using batch if I don't have the sas.exe in my machine? My computer has the SAS EG but the code is ran on our companies servers

Thanks

Answer 1

If you are asking whether it is possible to run SAS batch on your local machine without having SAS on your local machine, the answer is no.

If you are using EG to connect to a SAS server, and you want to execute a batch job on the SAS server, that is possible (just not with EG). For example, if you have terminal access to the SAS server via putty or whatever, you can do a batch submit.

Answer 2

Enterprise Guide is quite capable of scheduling jobs, whether or not you have a local SAS installation.

Wendy McHenry covers this well in Four Ways to Schedule SAS Tasks. Way 1 is what you probably are familiar with ('batch'), but Ways 2 through 4 are all possible in server environments.

Way 2 is what I use, which is specifically covered in Chris Hemedinger's post Doing More with SAS Enterprise Guide Automation. In Enterprise Guide since I think EG 4.3, there has been an option in the File menu "Schedule ...", as well as a right-click option on a process flow "Schedule ...". These create VBScript files that can be scheduled using your normal Windows scheduler, and allow you to schedule a process flow or a project to run unattended, even if it needs to connect to a server.

You need to make sure you can connect to that server using the credentials you'll schedule the job to run under, of course, and that any network connections are created when you're not logged in interactively, but other than that it's quite simple to schedule the job. Then, once you've run it, it will save the project with the updated log and results tabs.

If your company uses the full suite of server products, I would definitely recommend seeing if you can get Way 3 to work (using SAS Management Console) - that is likely easier than doing it through EG. That's how SAS would expect you to schedule jobs in that kind of environment (and lets your SAS Administrator have better visibility on when the server will be more/less busy).