SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

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.

Great post over on Hexware’s blog  with recommendations on what you should be documenting as part of your BI / Data Warehouse project.

I know of a couple of SAS Data Warehouse sites that are using a Wiki as a collaborative environment for documentation and we are using Mediawiki on a SAS BI/DW project I am working on at the moment.

We are using the Wiki to document all our processes, development standards, business rules and content (when we get time of course).

One of the things I struggle with is how to integrate the technical metadata, that resides in the SAS Metadata Repository, with the business metadata we are storing in the Wiki.

To that end at sasInct we are developing a web service that will interogate the SAS Metadata Repository and then display the results via a Mediawiki plugin.  The goal is to enable the technical metadata to be streamed to the Wiki in realtime and remove the need to copy and paste etc, or maintain two version.

We are also starting to make use of the description fields in Information Maps to provide business metadata to users when running a report, but we haven’t come up with an approach yet of how to populate that from the Wiki, or how to enable a user to click on an object in a report and open the relevant Wiki page with the business metadata.

Feel free to comment if you have done something cool in this space.

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…)

I have started doing some work looking at integrating Graphical Information Systems (GIS) with SAS environments (more on that later).When looking at the benefits of doing this integration 3 come to mind:

1. Using the spatial dimension within analysis (i.e show me all customer within a 100k radius of our Auckland office)
2. Displaying spatial attributes (i.e show me the boundaries of the property at 100 Queen St, Auckland)
3. Visualisation of data/information on geographic maps (i.e show me the ethnicity of people in Auckland as a pie graph, by city)

When thinking about advanced visualistion of data I have always found that GIS tools seem to deliver this better than most other tools (hence point 3). An example can be seen in the middle of the “Business Intelligence Visualizing Your DatabaseVisualizing Your Database” pdf presentation from ESRI.

Now SAS has some advanced graphing capabilities, just checkout the examples at
“Robert Allison’s SAS/Graph Examples!” to see some in action.

But these are fairly static and still require manual code, if you are using the GUI front ends (i.e Web Report Studio, OLAP Viewer) the options are still fairly limited (not that any other of the large BI vendors tools that I know of are any better).

You could try the SAS BI Dashboard Framework, but it is in my experience fairly difficult to use and maintain (some would say it is still a beta product, but 9.2 will bring a more robust version)

It is one of the reasons we are working on building our Flash Graph Portlet.

But if you look around the web while you start seeing some pretty sexy , not to mention useful ways to visualise data. An  example:

• Boston Redsox Home runs

Is sexy visualisation the way to go? Well whenever I stumble across any kind of award for dashboards or visulaisation, they are always fairly plain, with lots of text and a few bar graphs.

Checkout the winners of the MicroChartsCompetition No speedo’s or heat maps there.

So whats your thought.  Is it that visualisation is sexy and dashboards are not?

Do people expect to see sex and sizzle in a demo before they buy a product, but the users just really want easy access to lots of information?

While you mull that over checkout the SAS/GRAPH Dashboard Samples over at the SAS support site. Lots of good examples of both award winning dashboard styles, and speedo’s plus downloadable code examples.

The current release of SAS Web report Studio (3.1/SAS 9.1) doesn’t allow you to define cascading prompts, by this I mean allowing a user to select a country and then based on the country selected allow them to select a state within that country.

However in a paper presented at SAS Forum 2008 titled SAS Web Report Studio Tips and Techniques (Paper 064-2008 )   there is an innovative way outlined on how you can provide this capability by using linked reports.

The approach they have worked out is to create a report for each level of prompt and link the reports, enabling the user to select the appropriate value on each report (i.e first report they click on country from a list, then second report shows states etc) and then be linked to the next report where they can select the next parameter value, and so on and so on.

Great thinking outside the box!

I have been doing a bit of research around SAS 9.2, whats coming and when.

There was an interesting  presentation over at http://www.sascommunity.org/mwiki/images/3/3c/NewsCorner_SAS_Club_16.pdf  which (apart from not being in English) was dated Nov 2007 and outlined a road map for the delivery of 9.2.  It outlined:

Phase 1 (Classic) - Q1 2008

• Base, ETS, Graph, STAT, OR, QC, Share, Access,Connect

Phase 2 (Platform) -  Q3 2008

• Enterprise Guide, Data Integration Studio, Web Report Studio, Olap Server,

Phase 3 (Solutions) - Q4 2008

• SAS Solutions
• SAS Analytics: Enterprise Miner, Forecast Server, Model Manager

Ignoring the dates (they have obviously slipped but no official news on how much that I could find) the phasing seems to still be true, with Phase 1 already released.

In trolling around I did manage to find some information on what is being delivered in Phase 2, so I have posted them over on our main site at :

SAS 9.2 Information

Of course if you were lucky enough to attend SAS Forum 2008 and have anymore information feel free to post a comment with some juicy details.

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

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!

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!