SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

The 1.4 version of the BI Manager in the SAS Management Console has some pretty cool functionality around moving Web Report Studio reports and their underlying Information Maps across BIP Tree folders.

This is particularly useful if you don’t have a separate development/test  environment and are using separate BIP Tree folders for managing the development of reports by moving them across the folders (ie. Development Reports, Test Reports, Production Reports).

However if you still have BI Manager 1.3 installed the option to move the dependent information maps with the reports doesn’t exist.

The hot fix that you need to install on the SMC client to upgrade the BI Manager to 1.4 is on the SAS site here:

http://www.sas.com/apps/demosdownloads/foundationsvcs_PROD_1.1_sysdep.jsp

Trick for young players in that it is not on the SAS Support site under the usual hotfix area.

Hopefully  this will save you the hour or two we spent tracking down what we needed to do to upgrade.

Of course you could just manually export the files, hack the XML and re-import them like  Barry did

Excuse the rant but I am really hanging out for SAS 9.2

And by SAS 9.2 I don”t mean the current release which is little more than an upgrade to a few Proc’s (to me any way).  I mean:

• Drag and drop web reporting
• Office Addins that complies with metadata folders
• a fully integrated content capability
• a robust metadata server
• conditional processing in Enterprise guide
• proper prompting in web reporting
• JSR 168 capability in the portal
• a production dashboard capability

The more I research at it it is looking like 2009 before we will see it.  That means it will be 5 years between major releases.

Compare this to software as a service delivery models (but that should probably be a blog post for another time)

Peek-a-boo 9.2 I really want to see you.

I often see people on the SAS forums asking how to read a zip file in SAS.

I came across a great set of tips over at the Computer Measurement Group

And one of the tips was the following on how to access zip files via SAS code.

---

Using the ZIP engine to read zip filesThere is a currently undocumented filename engine available in SAS 9 that can be used to read from compressed ZIP files directly. You simply specify the engine “SASZIPAM” on a filename statement, and when referring to it you must specify the file within it that you wish to read.

In the example below “tomcat.zip” contains a number of files. I want to read “tomat.log” and therefore specify “in(tomcat.log)”, where “in” is the libref and “tomcat.log” is the file I will read from the zip file.

Sample SAS Program

filename in saszipam ‘c:\tomcat.zip’;

data _null_;

infile in(tomcat.log);

input ;

put _infile_;

if _n_>10 then

stop ;

run;

---

Easy peasy!

Interesting blog over at the SAS Blogs, about a Kiwi called David McNamara who has worked for SAS development for a while, returning home to sunny NZ and working remotely.
http://blogs.sas.com/sascom/index.php?/archives/295-Five-questions-with-David-McNamara.html

I have always  thought that would be nirvana, live in Nelson, work remotely, get paid in USD!

However reading about Dave’s  hours (1am - 9am) now Im not so sure.  I think the idea of having lunch at 5am would kill it for me.

If you are aiming to deliver self service report creation to end users, then no doubt you are deploying SAS Web Report Studio to enable them to create and manage reports.

If you have SAS Portal installed it is possible to provide single-signon between WRS and Portal.

In the Portal you create a new Application link and use:

http://webserver:port/SASWebReportStudio/logonFromPortal.do

Once the user has added this to their collection portlet, they can click on it and it will bypass the Web Report Studio login screen, automatically using their authenticated login details.

I have always found it difficult to understand in which SAS / product (i.e. SAS/Stat, SAS/ETS) a particular SAS Proc lives.

Internally within SAS there was a cheat sheet that had an unofficial list, but it was never published externally.

In the May SAS Tech Report there was a link to a SAS Support Usage note called Usage Note 30333: FASTats: Frequently Asked-For Statistics that list each Statistical process and some idea of where it reside.

Way cool.

And it even lists statistical processes commonly used but  not available in SAS.

Way cooler!

Doing some work at the moment that requires me to provide rough sizing for a new SAS hardware environment.

One of the things you may not know is that there is a group based in Carey that are responsible for doing sizing estimations for the various SAS teams around the world. They have a pretty hefty sizing questionnaire but once you have filled it out they are able to give you recommendations of what sort of hardware you will need. You will need to go through your SAS Account manager to access this service.

One of the great things this team has decided to do is to publish each sizing they do for a customer as an anonymous document. So the SAS teams are able to browse through say sizings for 4-cpu windows servers supporting SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence Server and get an idea of how many users they typically support. Great if you don’t really have a good idea of what user profile you will end up with (but obviously a little bit dangerous as well).

Again this is only accessible by SAS staff, so ask your friendly SAS Presales (Sales Consultant/Engineer depending on which part of the world you reside) to see if they can help.

There are some publicly available/publish benchmark documents for various configurations available, so I have added an article to the sasInct.com site where I can list them as I find them.

SAS Server Sizing reference Papers

HP have announced that they will buy EDS (which in sunny New Zealand is like the mouse eating the elephant)

I have posted before that I think SAS will eventually be brought (or merged) and that HP was a strong contender.

Well consuming EDS will take a lot of time and money, so will this create an opportunity for somebody else to make the move while HP is busy?

SAS has just announced that Enterprise Guide is now certified for Microsoft Vista over on their blog.

I can understand why you would install and run SAS Enterprise Guide, but haven’t quite seen the value in Vista, thank goodness Dell now ships there PC’s with Windows XP.

Now if only SAS would release Enterprise Guide for my Mac (5% market share and growing

I have finally got around to reading SAS for Dummies by Stephen McDaniels and Chris Hemedinger  (well I flicked through it at least).

One of the tips has ended up saving me a lot of time lately.

When you are in Enterprise Guide and you have large flows in the project designer, you also typically end up with a large number of tables, result, logs, code blocks etc open as well as individual tabs.

The downside of this is it is a hassle scrolling left to go back to the procces designer view.

I thought I was being clever when I worked out I could just click on the project explorer view and then on project designer at the top of the tree.

Well all you need to do is press ‘F4′ and you will be taken to the project designer windows faster than a F1 Ferrari.