I have used SAS Viya Platform for almost three years in various ways, including preparing data, using it, generating extracts, and sending them through email to users. We also built an internal dashboard specifically on SAS Viya Platform, and we mainly use it for usage metrics and many other KPIs that users follow. We have developed and shared many dashboards across teams.
We had two main use cases with SAS Viya Platform. The first was direct reporting to users, where we extracted data from SQL Server as well as Snowflake. We prepared the final report based on SAS Viya Platform using its capabilities and then generated Excel files to send to users' emails. This scenario proved to be very good and efficient in two ways: preparing data and performing many transformations using SAS capabilities, plus sending it in Excel format, which is very rare and difficult to achieve through Power BI, Tableau, or any other reporting tool. We found it critical to use for this purpose. The second scenario involved building reports for users where we used many different types of data sources that were difficult to consolidate in a way that served reporting purposes across various fields. Data came from different sources depending on the nature of the requirements: some from transaction systems, some from data warehousing, and some from portals. We had to consolidate all of these to create analytics and decision-making reports for users. We found this very useful.
It was good in that whatever we needed to prepare, we could prepare it, save it, and use it multiple times. This self-service capability allowed us to develop and prepare data once and then utilize it in multiple reports, which was very beneficial. Where we struggle and where improvement is needed is in how we can make report calculations more feasible for different kinds of calculations. If we can improve there, along with the setting of the UI, placing elements exactly where we want, and utilizing the entire canvas, that would be valuable.
I found it difficult to customize or prepare reports on the reporting side with SAS Viya Platform. Additionally, nowadays there are many AI capabilities that could be built in. I would expect that if those could be integrated into the existing SAS Viya Platform, it would be a really good tool to use.
Any core complex tasks, calculations on-the-fly, and many source integrations needed with SAS Viya Platform are very manageable, and specifically SQL-based tasks can be done through SAS Viya Platform. This can also be shared across with SAS Viya Platform reporting tool. In that way, it is a really good tool.