So, yes, we really did lose a full decade.
https://duckdb.org/2025/05/19/the-lost-decade-of-small-data.html
5 replies (most recent on top)
"We'd often give away VIYA to get folks to "migrate" and I know the company likes to tout those (or did) as new sales or migrations, but people weren't really moving."
Were those Viya give aways:
- Free for life OR
- Just a free trial for a limited specified time frame?
The sites I was at just let it sit unused.. i left SAS so never heard the outcome of give away Viya.
@mh Completely agree... My entire tenure at SAS was customer facing and Viya (both 3.5 and 4) were about as exciting as getting a cold sore to our customers. It's been a couple years since I left, but at the time there still wasn't parity with the old V 9 stuff and the cost to migrate was... well ridiculous.
We'd often give away VIYA to get folks to "migrate" and I know the company likes to tout those (or did) as new sales or migrations, but people weren't really moving.
SAS lost a decade chasing Viya My last years at SAS were heavily customer facing and hardly any customers had enthusiasm anywhere near the small internal pockets of Viya enthusiasm at SAS. SAS has never been strong with migration. Customers simply do not have the time or the patience for anything other than plug and play as they move forward.
Misery loves company, so it's nice to know some faulty-in-hindsight assumptions were industry wide and not company-specific. I recall having some discussions around ten years ago and some of us questioned if most enterprises would ever need the scale of the "hyperscalers" (not the word in use then). But those customers do want their platforms mainly running in the cloud, sometimes locally, sometimes both. Was the decade lost chasing windmills? Probably. Maybe the next release can still capitalize on these industry realizations?
Depends on use cases In a particular computing scenario. If you want to share a huge amount of data among hundreds of concurrent users then running DuckDB on a laptop is a no go.
The Viya CAS engine was designed specifically for high performance data management and analytics on multicore machines (SMP or distributed MPP) in multi-user environments. Around 2012 that market was our primary target vision for what became known as Viya.