Azure Databricks vs. SAS Enterprise Miner

Centralised notebooks are out directly into production. This can lead to poorly engineered code. It is very good for fast queries and our data team are always able to provide what we ask for. It is a big cost to our business so it is important it runs efficiently and returns on our investment.

Incentivized

SAS Enterprise Miner is world-class software for individuals interested in developing reproducible models in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps the most useful part of SAS Enterprise Miner is the ability to compare models with other models without writing code. The ensemble modeling capabilities is the easiest way to do ensemble modeling I have come across. SAS Enterprise Miner is well-suited for beginning to advanced analysts who know something about advanced analytics. The software is not well-suited for analysts or companies that have little interest in advanced modeling.

Incentivized

• Data Processing and Transformations based on Spark
• Delta Lakehouse when clubbed with an external cloud storage
• Governance using Unity Catalog to unify IAM
• Delta Live Tables is a product, which although relatively newer, has a great potential with the visuals of a pipeline.

Incentivized

• Enterprise Miner is really visual and lets you do a whole lot without actually going into the detailed options. For decent results, you should really explore the different advanced options though.
• The recent versions of Miner allow users to use R code in Miner. You can then compare several models and approach to get the best performing model.
• The resulting data is really well displayed and easy to understand (ex: the lift graph, score ranking, etc.)
• Miner has the ability to integrate custom SAS code which allows the user to add functionalities that are specific to the project.

Incentivized

• Intuitive interface
• Ease of use
• Providing FAQ or QRGs

Incentivized

• SAS is not as user friendly as other stats software.

Incentivized

Great for what we use day to day and does what we need it to do. Cost management is not fully developed across the UX and gets expensive very quickly for developing projects. Integrated very well with our Microsoft stack and can be worked on collaboratively which works well for us.

Incentivized

SAS' customer support used to be non-existent many years ago. Today, contacting SAS customer support is great. They are responsible, knowledgable, and seem to have an interest in getting the results right the first time. With that said, Enterprise Miner's online support is weak, probably because the user base is much smaller than other tools.

Incentivized

Against all the tools I have used, Azure Databricks is by far the most superior of them all! Why, you ask? The UI is modern, the features are never ending and they keep adding new features. And to quote Apple, "It just works!" Far ahead of the competition, the delta lakehouse platform also fares better than it counterparts of Iceberg implementation or a loosely bound Delta Lake implementation of Synapse

Incentivized

SAS EM has a very great set of machine learning and predictive analytics toolsets, which helped our organization achieve its goals. We used other tools, but for us, SAS EM was the most intuitive and easy to learn the tool and it provides greater data exploration and data preparation capabilities compared to the other tools we used.

Incentivized

• Helped reduce time for collecting data
• Reduced cost in maintaining multiple data sources
• Access for multiple users and management of users/data in a single platform

Incentivized

• In our organization, users were using SAS already so the learning curve was really low. Within a few weeks after the implementation, the users were already delivering models developed with SAS Enterprise Miner. It is difficult to talk about ROI as models were already being developed before. It was mostly a change of technology and it was a smooth transition.
• Going with Enterprise Miner came with migration from desktop use of SAS to a server use of SAS. This created a new role of SAS administrator. This was obviously a cost but as the use of SAS increased greatly, it was expected.
• From a methodology standpoint, Enterprise Miner helped greatly in the documentation of the model development which was a requirement in a few groups such as the risk groups. Having a visual "GUI-like" approach to development, the flowchart or diagram of the project in Miner was able to give users a good understanding of the approach the analyst took to develop the model.

Incentivized