Blogging about all things SAS

**** Update: Much better outline on the process for EG 4.3 over at Chris’s Blog http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/194-SAS-Enterprise-Guide-4.3-is-available.html ***

I do believe SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 has been released with a raft of new features!

A couple of presentations outlining what is new can be found here:

• SAS® Programmer’s Paradise: New Goodies in SAS® Enterprise Guide® 4.3
• Enterprise Guide 4.3 and Other Upcoming SAS Releases

And the official doco is here:

• http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/index.html

Looks like the other 4.3 clients (i.e WRS, Portal, BI Dashboards) are still slated for October 2010 (the year is always as important as the month sometimes , but Chris and team delivered Enterprise Guide 4.3 as promised in August (well done Chris!)

Now it seems that to get hold of EG 4.3 you need to request it from your account manager.

However this SAS Discussion Forum post http://support.sas.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=10452 indicates that some people have got hold of it by updating their software depot.

Reading between the lines I think it looks like the process is to contact your account manager to get a new download order and then update your software depot to get the software.  But as I said im guessing here.

Also it looks like there is some confusion about whether EG 4.3 will run on SAS 9.2 M2 or if SAS 9.2 M3 is a pre-requisite.

What I understand is that EG 4.3 requires SAS 9.2 M3 to be supported, but that it may work with M2.

If anybody has anymore info feel free to update SAS Discussion Forum post.

Oh and lastly reading the doco it seems that you need to migrate your EG projects to 4.3, even if they are currently 4.2.  I wonder if this means that they are then incompatible with EG 4.2 after that (like the migration for EG 4.1 > EG 4.2).  Think I need to contact my partner manager and get the new download order number and test a few things.

If you are using Dataflux as part of your SAS 9.2 Enterprise Data Integration (eDI) license then when you downlaod (or receive) your install depot you will have DF Studio 8.1 and Dataflux Integration Server 8.1.

The current Dataflux release is 8.2 and it is certified with SAS 9.2 so make sure you get a support login to the Dataflux website and download the 8.2 install executable and install that version.

Got a curly one from a customer yesterday, so thought I would throw it out to the wider community (and Chris from SAS to see if there is an answer.

So in Web Report Studio you can have the prompts that have been selected (i.e City = Auckland) automatically displayed on a report.

The customer is of course not using WRS but is using Enterprise Guide, Stored Processes and Office Addin.

They worked out a way to have Stored Processes that are delivered via Excel/AMO to display the selected prompts when executed, and we could use this concept in EG to effectively create two list reports (one for report content and one for selected prompts) and combine them in report.

But I was wondering if any knew of a way to have the prompts shown in a graph output etc?

So looks like the new M3 BI Clients are now looking to ship in October, so slipped into Q4.

But I do believe that Enterprise Guide might be out a little earlier than the other BI clients.

We will wait and see (not much else we can do

So we have a few customers where we have installed SAS 9.2 M2 on either on a live or a test environment.

We wanted to test applying the M3 maintenance release before the 4.3 clients come out as there are dependent.

So the process is to apparently run the download manager again and the install depot will be updated.

But before you do this you will need to talk to your account manager to get a new license code, or the download manager wont update the install depot.

Is it me or just this seem like one extra unnecessary step to apply a maintenance release for software a customer has paid for?

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick on this one and this is not required?

And of course when searching for documentation on installing/applying the M3 release you get nada.

As I have mentioned before SAS are going to release a new set of Business Intelligence clients under the 4.3 umbrella sometime before the end of the year.

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the new capability this week and one thing that really peeked my interest is the new integration with Microsoft Outlook.

We have been pushing the use of SAS Portal as the primary way of accessing our reporting content, but users have always gravitated towards using the Office Addin and access the data via Excel and Information Maps.

I think the integration with Outlook coming in 4.3 will move the majority of users off Excel and into outlook.  The key benefit is that this will move from some of the manually collated Excel content to the automated content we have created.

Why do I think this will happen?

Well because it removes the issue of having to login to the Portal or open Excel to access reports and data.  Users are permanently logged into Outlook, check there emails on a regular basis and therefore accessing their reporting content from there will just be easier.

The other thing I liked was the ability to embed BI Dashboard widgets into Outlook sidebars.  We have played around with creating desktop widgets for SAS but apart from being a cool demo I have never been convinced that people would use them in anger (and therefore we wouldn’t sell many

But if they are embedded in Outlook and therefore access is easy and ubiquitous then I think they may actually be used.

One thing I still think was lacking was the way the BI Dashboards are embedded in the SAS Portal, still some need for our !sasInct Flash Graph portlets for while yet.

But I do think the actual BI Dashboard application flash interface itself is pretty cool.

Anyway there is some details of whats coming in a paper done as SAS Forum 2010 – Better Decision Making with SAS® Enterprise Business Intelligence and Microsoft Outlook.

Also there is a pdf version of a presentation with some more details on the SAS BI 4.3 release and screenshots Enterprise Guide 4.3 and Other Upcoming SAS Releases

The only thing it doesn’t tell us is when it will actually arrive.

Struck a problem converting some Enterprise Guide projects from 4.1 (SAS 9.1.3) to 4.2 (SAS 9.2) around date prompts.

The EG projects have a large bunch of custom code nodes (so hate those!) and they are all running some macro’s that use a date prompt.

Of course they work fine in 4.1 but fail in 4.2.

Traced it to a change in the way date prompts work in eG 4.2 via this SAS Support note:

Problem Note 36581: Date and Datetime parameters might cause syntax errors after project migration to SAS® Enterprise Guide® 4.2

Followed the fix below and updated the date variable in the code from &date to “&date”d  and the date is back on!

For example, in earlier versions of SAS Enterprise Guide, the correctly generated %LET statement might be %let datevar = '01jan2009'd;. However, after migrating projects to 4.2, the statement is incorrectly generated as %let datevar = 01jan2009;.

To circumvent the problem, open the query in 4.2 and edit the filter by adding quotes around the parameter. For example, use "&YourDateVar"d for dates, and "&YourDateTimeVar"dt for datetime parameters.

I’m sitting the beta test for the SAS Business Intelligence certification tomorrow.

The beta version is a 3 hour and 15 minute exam, this is going to be interesting, exciting, scary, nerve racking……

And of course the opportunity has come at the last minute, so the chance to study is zilch!

I caught up with James Foster from SAS Australia last week and got a bit of an insight into where the SAS products are going in the next few months.

At the moment we are at SAS 9.2 M3 for the SAS Platform (eBI, eDI, EM etc).

Later this year (Mid Q3 ish?) a new set of the BI Clients will be released under the 4.3 banner (so Enterprise Guide 4.3, Web Report Studio 4.3 etc). These clients will bring massive enhancements to the BI client functionality.

Two that I have already mentioned are the enhancements Chris has outlined will be coming in Enterprise Guide 4.3 here and the new BI Dashboards James mentioned at SUNZ earlier this year.

To leverage this new functionality you will need to be on SAS 9.2 M3, then install the desktop/developments clients and/or redeploy the new Web App versions.

James also mentioned that SAS 9.3 is currently under development as the next major release and maybe be out sometime next year.

Its great to see we don’t have to wait another 5 years (aka SAS 9.1 –> SAS 9.2) before SAS delivers new capability. I think given the BI competitors SAS (aka Oracle, SAP) have in the market the speed of development is going to be key.

Bring it on!

I have been doing an install of SAS 9.2 eBI using Weblogic.

In all the SAS 9.2 install documentation from SAS it mentions Weblogic 9.2, but if you check out:

Oracle WebLogic Server Support for SAS 9.2

You will see Oracle Weblogic 10.3 is supported.  And when you download the install depot from SAS it will actually downloads Weblogic 10.3 in the thirdparty directory for you.

But when you follow the instructions and try and do the install you will probably get an error when the Install Wizard is configuring the web packages.

If you check the install/configure logs you will see this error:

Problem invoking WLST – ava.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError:
Bad version number in .class file

It seems although the install screen asks you for a location to the 1.5 version of the JDK, you actually need the 1.6 version of the JDK for it to work with Weblogic 10.3, according to this tech support note:

Usage Note 36538: The SAS® Deployment Wizard fails when you use Java Development Kit 1.5 with Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3

So when going through the wizard, point to the JDK 1.6 and you are away.