SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

Just spent the week attending the SAS Platform Administrator Fast Trackcourse.

I would highly recomend this course if you have to administer SAS9 Servers or just want a better understanding of how all the SAS 9 stuff fits together.

If you ever have to touch security in SAS 9 then you need to do this course!

Course outline is here:  http://support.sas.com/training/us/crs/pafast.html

I will be doing a few posts over the next  week to remind me of the things that I picked up and really want to remember.

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

As I mentioned earlier we are trying to do some testing around performance tuning our queries (well I say we but Evan Wilson is doing all the real work!)

So I have been looking for papers that provide some ideas on how to monitor or tune the SAS environment to make things go faster.

I have posted links and abstracts on any papers I found over on our main website under SAS Forum Papers - Performance  Tuning

Let me know if you know of any papers I have missed.

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

We are currently trying to monitor some SAS queries against our new Star Schemas to see if we can make them go faster.

So I have been doing a bit of research to see whats out there to help us do the monitoring.

In my search I stumbled across this article:

 

Monitoring SAS^® through the Web

ABSTRACT
Monitoring SAS processes and SAS work space in a mutli-user environment, such as UNIX, is key in maintaining optimal performance. This paper will present the SAS Monitor, a tool which captures SAS resources and uses SAS to analyze and display this information via a Web browser. SAS Monitor is useful for SAS/UNIX administrators and informative for end users since the information can be widely distributed through an intranet. Even though SAS Monitor has been tested on Solaris, it can be adapted to other flavors of UNIX. This paper will explore and explain some of the techniques used in capturing and publishing SAS resources on the web. 

They also provide example code for this at SAS Monitor - Source Code

 

Unfortunately the code is based upon  Unix and we are running windows. So the search continues….

As an aside we are still building the Star Schema’s using SAS Datasets but we plan to test SAS SPDS vs Oracle as a repository for the Star Schemas at the end of the year to see which performs better.  If one results in any noticable improvement we may move to it, as it will also solve any file locking issues we currently encounter with SAS Datasets.  More on that later.

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

Within the SAS Management Console there is a plugin called ‘Configuration Troubleshooter’ whihc has always been blank for me.  I thought it was a bit like the ‘Roadmap’ capability in SAS Management Console, i.e a place holder for something that hadn’t been implemented yet (or just never got developed as expected).

But with a hat tip to Barry Stevens at Housing New Zealand, it is a extremely powerful tool and even easier to setup.

So what is the Configuration troubleshooter? Well according to an excellent paper from SAS called

Best Practices for SAS BI Administrators: Using SAS Configuration Troubleshooter to Keep SAS Solutiions and SAS® BI Applications Running Smoothly

it is:

“The Configuration Troubleshooter is a plug-in for SAS® Management Console that is used to query and display the configuration of a SAS Business Intelligence environment. The Configuration Troubleshooter gathers configuration data from three main sources: the SAS® Metadata Repository; Web servers and Web application servers; and configuration files, and displays the data in a window for review and interpretation.”

For me it is a great tool that enables you to investigate what you have got setup, how and where. It also enables you to create your own rules to document and monitor areasthat aren;t in the standard Configuration Triubleshooter setup.

Checkout the SAS paper and have a go.

When SAS decided that they needed to provide enterprise scheduling capability they partnered with Platform Computing and bundled an OEM version of their LSF product into some of the suites, such as Data Integration Server and Business Intelligence Server (although I believe they are no longer bundled and have to be purchased separately).

Platform LSF provides the relatively unique capability of being able to schedule jobs across Mainframe, Unix and Windows servers (Oracle and Microsoft users will ask why this is needed, but remember SAS has been around for 25+ years, so there is still SAS on mainframes at most large SAS sites)

On the Platform website the marketing team have compiled a very descriptive description:

“Process Manager for SAS is comprehensive job scheduling software that automates the scheduling and execution of SAS jobs. It offers the sophistication of resource virtualization, optimal resource sharing, enterprise scalability and seamless manageability across the entire enterprise. SAS Grid-enabled Products -SAS Enterprise ETL Server -SAS Enterprise Miner -SAS Risk Dimensions”

The nice thing is SAS integrated LSF to talk to the Metadata Server, providing a reasonable level of automation.

Anyway there was an interesting paper called SAS® Scheduling: Getting the Most Out of Your Time and Resources at SUGI 30 in 2005, that outlines what LSF is, how to use it with SAS and even has some code examples.

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 install SAS 9 Business Intelligence server, Data Integration Server, Analytical Server or a SAS Solution, you will find that there are now a myriad of log files produced that you should (yes you really should) monitor and archive.

Install multiple of the SAS components on multiple physical servers and log trolling is even more fun.

So I have started to document the location and uses of these logs at : A list of SAS 9 Log locations and uses

Its probably going to take a while to populate all the details, so if you know of something that already exists, let me know.