End-to-End Lineage in SAS Viya with Alex Solutions
We are thrilled to announce the launch of the release of the Alex Solutions SAS Viya Scanner, a new capability that integrates SAS Viya into a seamless, end-to-end data story.
For many organisations, SAS Viya is the powerful engine driving critical business intelligence and machine learning outcomes. But for all its analytical strength, its role within a complex data ecosystem can often feel like a black box. How does data get in? What transformations happen inside? And where does it go next? Answering these questions has been a significant challenge.
The SAS Viya Visibility Gap
SAS Viya is an end-to-end platform where complex ETL cycles, data models, and reports are built. When it’s connected to dozens of other technologies like Snowflake, Oracle, and Azure Data Factory (ADF), understanding dependencies becomes nearly impossible. This creates risk. You can’t confidently decommission a source table or debug a report without a clear map of these connections. Our new scanner was built to provide that map.
The Solution in Action
In this video, we demonstrated how the Alex platform brings this new SAS Viya integration to life. The scanner connects to the Viya environment and begins mapping everything from datasets and files to the critical process workflows and reports.
1. The Data Flow: De-risking a Financial Close Process
Imagine a critical ETL process in SAS Viya, such as the Quarterly Financial Close Process. Instead of viewing it as an isolated workflow, our data lineage shows you the full picture across your entire technology stack. You can see that:
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An Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipeline is the trigger that initiates this quarterly SAS Viya data flow.
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The flow pulls source data from essential tables in Snowflake, such as the
GL_TRANSACTIONStable. -
It then enriches and outputs the results to a financial reporting database in Oracle.
This is a typical financial ETL cycle, now fully visible. The real power comes when you need to make a change. A team wants to update the schema of the GL_TRANSACTIONS table in Snowflake. How do you assess the impact?
With Alex, a single click on that table instantly reveals it is a critical source for not only the Quarterly Financial Close Process but also for several other vital data flows, instantly highlighting the downstream impact of any changes. What was once a high-risk investigation is now a simple, confident query.
2. The Report: Building Trust in Sales Analytics
Now consider a high-visibility SAS Viya report, like the Regional Sales Performance Dashboard, used by executives every week. The most common question about any report is, “Can I trust this data?” End-to-end lineage provides the definitive answer.
The lineage view clearly shows the dashboard is fed by curated source SAS CAS tables. You can expand the hierarchy to see the full path—including the CAS provider and its libraries—showing precisely where the data originates and giving stakeholders confidence in the numbers.
Furthermore, you can perform impact analysis here as well. Let’s say the analytics team needs to update the logic in a source CAS table that aggregates monthly sales data. By selecting that source table, they can immediately see that it feeds both the Regional Sales Performance Dashboard and the Global Q3 Sales Forecast report.
This visibility is crucial for governance, preventing inconsistent metrics across your analytics and ensuring all stakeholders are aligned.
Beyond Lineage: Deep Metadata Insights
True data intelligence goes beyond just lines and boxes. Our scanner also harvests rich metadata from within SAS Viya. For any data flow or report, you can see who the owner is, when it was created or last modified, and even view the JSON elements that list the specific charts and tables used within a report. This detailed context turns your data catalog from a simple map into an actionable intelligence hub.
With the new SAS Viya scanner, your SAS environment is a fully transparent, governable, and integrated part of your data ecosystem.
