Talk in the office today led to a discussion on hotfix policy. SAS encourage their customers to apply maintenance releases when they become available, but I err on the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" side of the fence. Any change to your production systems must necessarily involve planning and testing - and that all takes time and money.
SAS V9.2's third maintenance release shipped in May. If you're tempted to deploy it, don't forget to test it first. No matter how much testing SAS have done, it does not equate to testing at your own site.
Plus, give a second thought to backups and disaster recovery. The complexity of SAS deployments increased significantly between V8 and V9. If you have a SAS system problem, or an environmental problem, do you know how you would individually recover your data, your metadata, your WebDAV data, etc? And do you know how you would recover them so that they are synchronised with each other? SAS Global Forum 2008's paper entitled "Backup and Disaster Recovery: When Disaster Strikes, What Will You Do? What Will You Do?" is a must-read for those planning their first SAS V9 deployment. If you've already deployed V9, read the paper quickly and review your deployment!
