Business intelligence software provider SAS Institute Inc. said it intends to expand its efforts to integrate its analytics framework and applications directly into several relational and non-relational database management platforms commonly used by manufacturers to store and manage transactional data.
The move will allow manufacturers to more quickly create, implement, and run analytical models used, for example, to analyze large amounts of warranty information to understand the underlying product defects, said Scott Van Valkenburgh, SAS director of alliances, in an interview with Managing Automation.
Traditionally, in order to use analytical tools such as SAS’ data mining software, users would download large amounts of data from transactional database management systems such as Teradata’s into SAS’ environment. The data would then be analyzed, and results passed back to the transactional database.
That approach, however, requires lots of time for data to be shipped back and forth between the transactional database and the analytics environment. It also requires data migration code that must be validated and tested whenever the SAS or database environment changes.