SingleStore has added an upstream analytics player to its ecosystem with SAS and its Viya offering.
SAS is a long-time analytics processing software producer. Viya is its cloud-native AI, analytic and data management business intelligence software that runs the CAS (Cloud Analytics Services) multi-server parallel processing system. SingleStore is a combined transactional and analytic database that can run either in memory or in a hybrid memory and storage drive (disks, SSDs) mode. Its combined transaction and analytical features, it says, make time-consuming extract, transform and load (ETL) procedures faster. This intergration enables the use of Viya analytics and AI technology on data stored in SingleStore’s cloud-native real-time database.
SingleStore CEO Raj Verma said: “The integration of SingleStore’s hybrid, multi-cloud database into the parallel analytics engine, SAS Viya, will dramatically improve performance, reduce cost, and enable real-time applications for organizations.”
SAS CTO Bryan Harris added: “For many organizations, getting value out of analytics, machine learning and AI is often associated with complexity, extended timelines and significant costs. I’m excited to introduce the next generation of analytic architecture, SAS Viya with SingleStore, that is hyper-focused on addressing each of these challenges.”
Viya is a multi-machine (server or VM) distributed platform. A server controller and server worker machines networked together, usually via Ethernet, collectively provide SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS). The CAS setup talks to accessing clients through an SPRE (SAS Programming Run-time Environment) server.
In Viya, analytics processing multiple tables can be loaded and retained in memory for repeated use. Each table is distributed across the workers and processed in parallel and saved to storage. Multiple users can use the same in-memory data for different processing tasks.
SPRE provides client sessions for individual users. It includes the SAS Foundation and SAS Studio as the user programming interface. Users access SAS Viya from a browser on remote client machine, generally using a SAS Studio interface. SPRE is used to start a CAS session on the CAS server controller. Viya can run on-premises or in the AWS, Azure, and GCP clouds.
Data needs to be imported from external sources into Viya, with Excel spreadsheet files and CSV data loaded into a SAS Drive. Alternatively data connectors can be used, either serial or parallel. SAS has around 20 connectors already for Viya:
Now SingleStore gets added to the list. SAS and SingleStore say their integration enables SAS’s AI and machine learning analytics to be executed directly against relational database tables in SingleStore.
For its part, SingleStore has connectors for Spark, IBM Cognos analytics, and SAS-competitor Tableau.
The SingleStore-SAS partnership was first announced in December 2020. It has taken 20 months for the two to develop software to integrate SAS Viya and SingleStore. It’s a win-win as Viya is now an analytics processing layer for SingleStore and SingleStore an integrated external data source for Viya.
More information can be found on SingleStore’s website now, and on the SAS website later today.
