SWAT is an R package that enables you to interface with SAS Cloud Analytics Services (CAS), the in-memory server that is the centerpiece of the SAS Viya platform. Using the SWAT package, you can write an R program that connects to a CAS server, analyze large in-memory data sets, and then work with the results of the data analysis using familiar data-wrangling techniques in R.
This package provides facilities for starting a CAS session and running actions in CAS--such as classifying data with a decision tree or modeling with linear regression. Data processing is performed by CAS, which can scale from a single-machine server to distributed servers that run on multiple hosts and perform massively parallel processing.
To use the SWAT package for R, the client machine that runs R must meet the following requirements:
dplyr, httr and jsonlite packages. These packages
have additional dependencies that are automatically installed from CRAN
when you run install.packages(). The SWAT package for R is available from SAS as a tar.gz file. You can download releases from https://github.com/sassoftware/R-swat/releases.
After you download the package, you can install the package with a command that is similar to the following:
R CMD INSTALL R-swat-X.X.X-platform.tar.gzYou can also install from within R directly using a URL.
# Make sure prerequisites are installed
> install.packages('dplyr')
> install.packages('httr')
> install.packages('jsonlite')
> install.packages('https://github.com/sassoftware/R-swat/releases/download/vX.X.X/R-swat-X.X.X-platform.tar.gz',
repos=NULL, type='file')If you are running on a platform that does not have an associated installer, you should install the source code tar.gz. These platforms will be limited to using the CAS REST interface only.
> install.packages('https://github.com/sassoftware/R-swat/archive/vX.X.X.tar.gz',
repos=NULL, type='file')Using a .authinfo file is not required to use the package, but is recommended. When you enter your credentials (user ID and password) in a .authinfo file and secure the permissions, you can avoid specifying those credentials in programs.
Throughout the documentation, it is assumed that you have a .authinfo file. The following statement connects R to CAS and supplies the credentials from the .authinfo file:
conn <- swat::CAS('cloud.example.com', 8777, protocol='http')If you do not use a .authinfo file, then you must connect with a statement like the following:
conn <- swat::CAS('cloud.example.com', 8777, protocol='http', username='sasdemo', password='!s3cret')Communication between R and CAS can be performed in a binary format with proprietary C libraries, or over HTTP to a REST interface on the server. The C libraries (and therefore binary communication) are supported for 64-bit Linux or Windows only. Connections to CAS that use binary communication are similar to the following example:
conn <- swat::CAS('cloud.example.com', 5570)> library(swat)
# Connect to CAS
> conn <- swat::CAS('cloud.example.com', 8777)
# Load Iris data set into in-memory table
> iris.ct <- as.casTable(conn, iris)
# Use basic R functions on CAS table
> min(iris.ct$Sepal.Length)
[1] 4.3
> max(iris.ct$Sepal.Length)
[1] 7.9
> mean(iris.ct$Sepal.Length)
[1] 5.843333
# Call CAS actions on the table
> out <- cas.simple.summary(iris.ct)
> out
$Summary
Column Min Max N NMiss Mean Sum Std StdErr Var
1 Sepal.Length 4.3 7.9 150 0 5.843333 876.5 0.8280661 0.06761132 0.6856935
2 Sepal.Width 2.0 4.4 150 0 3.057333 458.6 0.4358663 0.03558833 0.1899794
3 Petal.Length 1.0 6.9 150 0 3.758000 563.7 1.7652982 0.14413600 3.1162779
4 Petal.Width 0.1 2.5 150 0 1.199333 179.9 0.7622377 0.06223645 0.5810063
USS CSS CV TValue ProbT
1 5223.85 102.16833 14.17113 86.42537 3.331256e-129
2 1430.40 28.30693 14.25642 85.90830 8.004458e-129
3 2582.71 464.32540 46.97441 26.07260 2.166017e-57
4 302.33 86.56993 63.55511 19.27060 2.659021e-42
# Explore results
> out$Summary[c('Column', 'Min', 'Max')]If you get an error message about the TCP/IP negClientSSL support routine, you likely have an issue with your SSL certificate configuration. See the Encryption documentation (the R configuration is the same as the Python client) for more information.