Blogging about all things SAS

March 11, 2010

Moton Charts, I so want to build one

Filed under: General — Tags: — Shane Gibson @ 9:37 pm

I love these motion charts that Google delivers:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/home

Unfortunately Government clients in NZ can;t use them as it is against the rules to store this data externally.

I know SAS JMP has this capability and you can export the motion charts as a flash file and embed it in the portal, but a portlet that allows these to be displayed dynamically in the Portal will be soooo cool.

Unfortunately even the new graph engine we are moving to doesnt provide these.

So need to move this from an idea to a delivery….

March 10, 2010

SAS 9.2 – Connecting to Eneterprise Miner 6.1

Filed under: SAS 9.2 — Tags: , — Shane Gibson @ 9:04 pm

When connecting to SAS Enterprise Miner 5.x on SAS 9.1.x you normally entered a connection string that was the EM servername followed by the port, with the standard port being :5199.

With SAS Enterprise Miner 6.1 on SAS 9.2 the standard port changed to :6412 (for a Lev1 environment)

March 6, 2010

SAS Access – Who plays nicely with who(m)

Filed under: Architecture and Administration, x - Notes to Self — Shane Gibson @ 9:59 pm

Just saw this post on Chris H’s blog here and I am replicating it so I can find it when I need it. (cause half my posts are there so I can find them when I need them)

If you want to know what version of SAS/Access works with what operating system and what release and what database etc, then look here:

http://support.sas.com/matrix/list?SAS=All&Engine=All&OS=All&googleTrack=on

SAS 9.2 Sample Install Plans

Filed under: General — Tags: — Shane Gibson @ 9:06 pm

When installing SAS 9.1.x from a software depot, you needed to have an Install Plan and the only people who could generate these were SAS employees.

For SAS 9.2 there are now sample install plans available on the SAS  site here:

http://www.sas.com/installcenter/plans

Of course I was looking for a STM install plan, which isn’t there but that is different issue ….

March 5, 2010

SAS Management Console 9.1.3 – Invalid Templates

Filed under: SAS 9.1 — Tags: — Shane Gibson @ 10:10 pm

Its been a full on week what with the SAS 9.2 migration and a whole lot of other work happening on another project.

Also this week I seem to have been shown a lot of tips and tricks I didn’t know you could do.

One of them was found by Rob and passed on to me (thanks Rob).

The issue was in SAS 9.1.3 Management Console and related to some of the screens not having all the relevant fields displayed.  As an example the Libname edit screen might be missing the field where you normally define the file path.

The fix was to go into the Metadata Manager > Resource Templates tree in SMC and delete the relevant template.

Then logout of SMC and log back in and SAS will automagically re-create a new template, and it will be valid.

March 4, 2010

SAS 9.2 – A Read-access violation

Filed under: SAS 9.2 — Tags: — Shane Gibson @ 10:18 pm

In the middle of my first production SAS 9.2 upgrade (yeeehaaaaa).

After SAS had finished the install we manually converted the relevant metadata etc.

We then used the EG Migration Wizard (more on this in another post) and then tried to run the project.

Code that used to run fine in SAS 9.1 gave an error like this in SAS 9.2:

ERROR:  Read Access Violation In Task [ SQL ]
Exception occurred at (032F94F6)
Task Traceback

After applying the hotfix here: http://support.sas.com/kb/37/012.html  to the server it ran fine.

March 2, 2010

SVG is cool

Filed under: General — Tags: — Shane Gibson @ 8:00 pm

SPM 1.4 was based around an XML as the backend and for the frontend HTML and from memory SVG.  In SPM 2.x you can publish diagrams in SVG as well.

The cool thing with SVG is that the images are all created based on txt files with location and colour information.

Check this one out:

http://www.degrafa.org/source/Car/Car.html

Then right click and look at the source, nothing but txt cool!

Pity SVG is not more widely adopted, but then with the advent of flash and flex and there navigation abilities, I suppose it is not surprising.

February 14, 2010

DI Studio – Missing Nodes – DentityExpansionLimit=1000000

Filed under: DI Studio, SAS 9.1 — Tags: , — Shane Gibson @ 8:35 pm

I needed to install the SAS 9.1.3 Clients into a new Citrix server (yes it is unsupported in 9.1.3 but has worked well for the last 4 years, just don’t ask SAS Tech Support for help of course).

After the installs were all complete and we started migrating users from our old Citrix server, they started complaining of issues with DI Studio.  These included:

- Nodes missing in the Inventory tree

- Options missing in the custom transform / custom code nodes

Adding the following option to the DI Studio ini file fixed both issues:

-DentityExpansionLimit=1000000

No idea why it fixed it and only reference on support.sas.com is a similar setting for Information Map studio here to fix it not being able to open more than 999 objects.

But as always fix it first, question it later.

February 13, 2010

Creating Information Map Libnames (9.1.3)

Filed under: Architecture and Administration, SAS 9.1 — Tags: , , — Shane Gibson @ 9:02 pm

If you want to use a Information Map as a data source for tasks such as DI Studio Jobs, Stored Processes, or building OLAP cubes, you can create a SAS Library that points to a folder that contains the Information Maps.

Each Information Map then gets treated as a table in the library.

To do this either use the following SAS code:

libname ImapLib sasioime
user=”username”
pw=”password”
metaserver=”servername”
metaport=8561
metarepository=”Foundation”
mappath=”/BIP Tree/InfoMaps/sales”

Of course you need to add your on environment settings for the variables.

Or you can create it in metadata by creating a libname with:

  • Create a generic libname
  • Type =  sasioime
  • Options = user=”username” pw=”password” metaserver=”servername” metaport=8561 metarepository=”Foundation” mappath=”/BIP Tree/InfoMaps/sales”

Issues to be aware of:

  • It is slow as you are going through multiple layers to get to the data (i.e Libname > Infomap > Query and Reporting Services > Libname > Data)
  • The user is hard coded for the libname
  • If the libname has fields defined with gaps in the names the SAS Libname will not show the column.

February 2, 2010

SAS 9.1.3 Client Metadata Profile Paths

Filed under: Architecture and Administration, SAS 9.1 — Tags: , — Shane Gibson @ 10:41 pm

I have been doing an install of SAS 9.1.3 clients on a a Citrix server (yes I know it is not supported) and all worked fine with Enterprise Guide etc but all the Java clients wouldn’t run.

Everytime they started up they couldn’t find some path and just gave an error saying path could not be found.

We troubled shooted it to the fact that we had changed the Citrix server layout from the last server and had used different drive mappings.  As part of this we had moved where the SAS Client Metadata Profile settings (.swa files) were stored.

So when SAS Data Integration Studio, Management Console etc started they looked for the .swa files in the location defined on the previous Citrix server (as the Citirix profile travels with the user across servers).

The fix was to edit the app.smc file in the users directory (for us C:\Documents and Settings\~user).  In that file is a line:

WorkspacePath=C:\\Documents and Settings\\~user\\Workspaces

Which defines where the Metadata profile files (.swa) are stored.

the other options (thanks SAS tech Support) is to put the following option on the clients .ini file (i.e C:\Program Files\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.1\sasmc.ini):

-Duser.home=C:\SAS

This will then make all users access the .swa files under a workspace dir under this path.  But of course they all access the same ones, so lock them down so they can’t be changed.

Trick for young players on that one, make sure it is after the “-Dsas.app.class.dirs=” option as if you add it at the end it gets ignored for some reason.

And of course do it for each of the SAS clients.

One of the

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