I've recently had the benefit of spending some "quality time" with Enterprise Guide V4.2 (and SAS V9.2). I've enjoyed migrating a selected sample of my client's SAS/Base programs into EG projects. The foibles of my client's code gave me a great opportunity to re-evaluate EG's visual-coding, and to inform my client of the benefits and challenges of adopting visual-coding wholesale.
Visual-coding is the term I use to describe the creation of programs by the visual connection of process nodes with data nodes using a drag-and-drop graphical user interface. A visually-coded program usually results in a flow chart-like diagram of the program's activity.
The first point I should make is that EG does not force you to adopt visual-coding. You can use EG's program node with its code editor and ignore visual-coding altogether. Compared with SAS's classic display manager interface, you'll lose the ability to use the interactive DATA step debugger and to view the content of SAS catalogs, you'll gain an integrated FTP client, seamless remote submission of your code, and you can use visual-coding for wizard-like code generation for thoser PROCs you're less familiar with.
My two primary observations about EG are:
1) It's not a visual ETL tool. If you want to generate ETL in a visual manner, get DI Studio. EG's in-built task nodes do not provide any means of updating your data. Your only output options are a) create a new data set, or b) completely over-write an existing data set. In some cases option (b) is not available within a single task (most notably in the APPEND task). In many cases EG's options will be sufficient, but the absence of SQL's INSERT and UPDATE statements, and DATA step's MODIFY and UPDATE statements, means that it may not be the best tool for developing visual ETL.
2) You need to become competent with SQL if you want to use EG's visual-coding in an effective manner. Most of EG's data manipulation tasks are based upon SQL. Particularly the Query Builder task. If you want to go beyond the basics you need to understand how to use SQL syntax such as DISTINCT, GROUP and CASE. And you need to understand what each of the different types of joins do. If you're an experienced SAS programmer you won't struggle to get to terms with the new syntax, but you do need to know it.
I'll offer some more specific findings in the next few posts. In the meantime, if you have any observations of your own, please provide a comment to this post and start a conversation. You can also make use of the EG discussion forum on the SAS Support web site; and learn lots from Chris Hemedinger's blog.