SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

Struck a frustrating problem the other day where new users were unable to login to the SAS Portal.

When they tried they would get an  “incorrect login” error, even though we could login in succesfully to any other windows environment (we are using windows authentication)

So off to the log files we went and we noticed this gem:

   UpdateMetadata return code=807fe8f4....
   DoRequest return code=807fe8f4....
   The user does not have permission to perform this action.

Which according to this SAS Support article:

Usage Note 20381: The login might fail with a permission error

and states that the user does not have writemetadata permission on the Portal Application Tree, which means when they login the Portal cannot create a new folder in the metadata to hold their portal preferences.

Of course I would say that the error message that was displayed to the user was far from helpful, but as I was tightening metadata security before this started appearing then it all makes sense.

Thank SAS for the logs otherwise I think we would be chasing this one for a while.

If you ever try to create a dataset or any other write function to a Metadata based Libname, from within SAS Enterprise Guide you will have encountered the old “METAOUT=DATA” error message.

What this says is that due to the libname bing a metadata based libname you can’t write to it.

Well there is an easy way to fix this:

1. In SAS Management console  go to the properties of the desired libname
2. Click on the extended attributes tab
3. Create an new entry with the following values
   1. Name = AssignMode
   2. Value = 2
4. Try it via EG now and Helens your auntie (but not your prime minister - apologies to non kiwis its a GIS joke!)

This lovely option is easily found here:

http://support.sas.com/kb/20/760.html

Other option values you can use are:

0 Assign using SAS Enterprise Guide
1 Assign using the META engine, METAOUT=ALL (default META engine behavior)
2 Assign using the META engine, METAOUT=DATA
3 Assigned by the SAS server (pre-assigned)
This info (and a raft of other cool Enterprise Guide stuff) can be found here:

http://support.sas.com/techsup/technote/ts788.pdf

Working with a customer where we have decided to utilise the current Oracle Data Warehouse as much as possible as the source of data for reporting, given the significant investment in the data warehouse over the last few years.

Rather than extract the Oracle data into SAS we were testing using SAS Information Maps and Web Report Studio over the top of the Oracle Star Schema’s.  I have to say I was impressed with the performance of the Web Report Studio reports given the number of layerswe were traversing, i.e

Web Report Studio > Information Map > SAS Workspace Server > Proc Sql >SAS Access to Oracle > Oracle (and back again).

Anyway one issue we found was that we couldn’t apply SAS Date Formats against the Oracle date fields, if we did it would just show ******* instead of a date.

We could use a datepart function to substring the date field and that worked ok, but that could only be applied in the Information Map, not against the Metadata definition which means other tools such as SAS OLAP Cubes and Enterprise Guide etc wouldn’t pick it up.

We tried  changing the Metadata definition for datefields from DATETIME20. to say DATE9. , but then our friends ****** would appear.  Even worse if we reapplied the DATETIME20. format to the metadata definition it set all the dates to 1960.  We had to delete the metadata definition and reimport it to get the correct dates again.

The solution was in the “Usage Note 6413: SASDATEFMT option can be defined globally in the config file or as an environment variable with SAS/ACCESS Interface to Oracle” here:

http://support.sas.com/kb/6/413.html

Although it talks about SAS 8 we applied the following statement to the sasv9.cfg file:

-set SASDATEFMT date

Rebooted the workspace server, deleted and re-imported the Oracle Table Metadata and wallah the Oracle date fields were know registered as Date. and aplpying date formats in the Metadata definition, Information Maps or Enterprise Guide worked the way they should!

As an aside in working through the options we worked out that thwre is a magic number that if you take it away from the numeric Oracle data value you get the numeric SAS date value, whihc makes sense I suppose given they both juts start counting days to manage dates, they just start counting from different points.

Mental note to self…..

There is a  free tool, called Process Explorer, for Windows servers that provides enhanced monitoring of processes that are running on the servers.  Much better than the standard windows taskman or perfmon.

You can  downlaod it from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Mental note to self, if you want to add a new deployment directory to deploy jobs too, for the scheduler then:

Within SAS Management Console right click on the Schedule Manager folder/tree and the select create new deployment directory.

Details are on page 142 of this, http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/91pdf/sasdoc_913/mgmtconsole_ug_9952.pdf

I always forget what portlets are installed by default in the SAS Portal (compared to the many I add to test etc)

So quick note for myself to remind me (sourced from Understanding Portlets)

(more…)

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 blogged earlier on how to purge your SAS Metadata Repository to reclaim the space from deleted metadata objects. Purging the metadata repository removes the deleted metadata objects from the repository.

However as the metadata repository is physically stored in SAS Datasets, you haven’t actually reduced the size of the metadata repository disk storage. To do this you have to run the  %OMABAKUP macro with the reorg=yes option.

I have created a three part article that outlines how to do each step (well it has two parts for now as I am still working on part three and will blog it when I have finished)

If you ever need to change the passord for one of the SAS Administrator id’s (i.e. sasadm, sastrust, saswbadm, sassrv, sasdemo etc) then you will find that it is not a simple case of updating the hosts password and metadata passwords.

There are a few more places that you will need to edit.

SAS Tech Support have a document that explains what you need to do - TS736 - Changing Password for Default Users

The doc is orientated towards a solutions based install, but you will need to follow most of the steps, depending on what products you have installed (i.e. Business Intelligence Server, Data Integration Server etc)

As you will see lots of text edits required, but I wont rant about why this shouldn’t be so difficult, here’s hoping SAS 9.2 makes it a little easier…..

When you do a new SAS 9 install, there are a number of distinct user id’s that have to be created, which map to specific roles within the SAS 9 environment. While you can change the default usernames, it is recommended that you create and use these distinct user id’s rather than using a single (or combined) id.

The required user id’s are:
sasadm - The SAS Administrator user id should be created on your metadata server machine. This user has privileges to manage user accounts in metadata and administer the metadata server. The SAS Administrator has unrestricted access to the metadata and this user ID should be protected accordingly. This ID should only be used for the SAS Management Console application.

sassrv- The SAS General Server user id should be created on your server machines. You must make the SAS security group its default group. This account will be used by the object spawner to launch stored process servers. This account will need access to any OS resources required to run stored processes. The default configuration of the SAS 9.1 Intelligence Architecture creates this single account for load balanced, stored process server usage. Additional server accounts can be created to give different levels of access as required.

sasguest- The SAS Guest user id will need to be created on your metadata server machine. This user is a generic user account and should have the lowest level of security privileges. This user id is used by the SAS® Information Delivery Portal to log users into the public kiosk area.

sastrust- The SAS Trusted User will be created on the metadata server machine. Because this user ID is a trusted ID, SAS servers such as the OLAP server and mid-tier applications can use this ID to impersonate authenticated clients on the metadata server; that is, the servers can communicate with the metadata server on behalf of the clients. This is a highly privileged account and should be protected accordingly.

sasdemo- The SAS Demo User will be created on your metadata server machine. This user has permission to demonstrate the SAS software you have installed and to verify the configuration.

saswbadm- The SAS Web Administrator will be created on your metadata server machine. You need only create an account for the Web administrator if you will be installing web applications, such as SAS® Web Report Studio, SAS® Web Report Viewer, or SAS Information Delivery Portal. This user has permission to administer the SAS Web infrastructure.

This information was sourced from Sugi 29 - Paper 225-29

Top Deployment Considerations for the SAS® 9.1 Intelligence Architecture

Which also provides a great overview of how the whole SAS 9 environment hangs together, check it out.