SAS Institute and MERANT announced that SAS will integrate MERANT’s data access technology, DataDirect, with SAS’ data warehousing solutions to enhance access to Microsoft SQL Server from UNIX platforms. The agreement extends the flexibility of SAS’ comprehensive data warehousing offerings and provides another way for SAS customers to access their mission-critical data and pull it into an SAS data warehouse for analysis and decision support. MERANT DataDirect provides an easier way for users of UNIX-based SAS data warehousing solutions to access and process data stored in Microsoft SQL Server databases. With the integration of MERANT’s standards-based technology, SAS customers can further leverage their investments in Microsoft SQL Server databases. “A growing number of companies are using Microsoft SQL Server as their underlying database foundation for data marts, while UNIX is considered the standard for deploying enterprise-class applications,” says Tony Fisher, SAS’ data warehousing technologies director. “We were looking for the capability to help our customers leverage their UNIX-based SAS applications with strategic data stored in SQL Server … Not only is MERANT one of the leaders in data access technology, but they have an exclusive source-code license with Microsoft to port SQL Server data connectivity to UNIX.”
