Made me think about the new scheduling capability that has been bundled in SAS 9.2, so I did a little searching on the SAS Support site.

On the About Scheduling Servers page they provide a good overview of the different options which are available, which are:

• LSF (Platform Process Manager)
• Operating System (guessing Cron for Unix and Windows Scheduler)
• In-Process scheduling server (which is a new part of SAS 9.2)

So what does the In-Process scheduling server cover?

Well according to most of the support pages it only refers to Web Report Studio, but back on the About SAS Scheduling page it mentions:

• SAS Data Integration Studio
• SAS Web Report Studio
• SAS Marketing Automation
• And custom SAS code

I notice Enterprise Miner models are missing, I am guessing you could schedule them as custom SAS code but I do wonder if it just wasn’t mentioned because EM 6.1 was released slightly after the initial 9.2 release.

Although I did check out the What new in Enterprise Miner 6.1 page and nothing was mentioned.

Ps. There is a great flow diagram (well ok the graphics aren’t that great but you know what I mean) on the Overview of the Scheduling Process page which shows how the new scheduling all hangs together.

It reminded me of the internal presentations SAS had on flow a transaction went through when it came to Authentication and Authorisation of the SAS environment. It was the only way I finally got to understand how it all hug together, so I am a great fan of process flow diagrams.

Which is one of the reasons I liked LSF because you could see a graphical flow, and its great to see the new SAS In-Process scheduling server has graphical process flow, and they look much sexier than the LSF ones (and yes this is important!). Check out an example of the Specifying Dependencies page