SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

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!

Doing some work at the moment that requires me to provide rough sizing for a new SAS hardware environment.

One of the things you may not know is that there is a group based in Carey that are responsible for doing sizing estimations for the various SAS teams around the world. They have a pretty hefty sizing questionnaire but once you have filled it out they are able to give you recommendations of what sort of hardware you will need. You will need to go through your SAS Account manager to access this service.

One of the great things this team has decided to do is to publish each sizing they do for a customer as an anonymous document. So the SAS teams are able to browse through say sizings for 4-cpu windows servers supporting SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence Server and get an idea of how many users they typically support. Great if you don’t really have a good idea of what user profile you will end up with (but obviously a little bit dangerous as well).

Again this is only accessible by SAS staff, so ask your friendly SAS Presales (Sales Consultant/Engineer depending on which part of the world you reside) to see if they can help.

There are some publicly available/publish benchmark documents for various configurations available, so I have added an article to the sasInct.com site where I can list them as I find them.

SAS Server Sizing reference Papers

SAS has just announced that Enterprise Guide is now certified for Microsoft Vista over on their blog.

I can understand why you would install and run SAS Enterprise Guide, but haven’t quite seen the value in Vista, thank goodness Dell now ships there PC’s with Windows XP.

Now if only SAS would release Enterprise Guide for my Mac (5% market share and growing

I have finally got around to reading SAS for Dummies by Stephen McDaniels and Chris Hemedinger  (well I flicked through it at least).

One of the tips has ended up saving me a lot of time lately.

When you are in Enterprise Guide and you have large flows in the project designer, you also typically end up with a large number of tables, result, logs, code blocks etc open as well as individual tabs.

The downside of this is it is a hassle scrolling left to go back to the procces designer view.

I thought I was being clever when I worked out I could just click on the project explorer view and then on project designer at the top of the tree.

Well all you need to do is press ‘F4′ and you will be taken to the project designer windows faster than a F1 Ferrari.

I have talked to a number of customers that are having a problem with the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office (AMO) remembering a users password and then locking them out of their account.

When a user configures their connection to the SAS Server in AMO they can save their password, so they effectively gain a form of single sign on. (The password is stored as an encrypted text string in an XML file).

A number of customers I talked to also have some form of LDAP authentication setup (i.e. Active Directory), Unfortunately when a user changes their password on the LDAP server, AMO doesn’t know about it. It keeps trying to authenticate the user with their old password until the users account gets locked.

SAS Enterprise Guide also enables the user to store their connection credentials, but it seems to prompt the user to re-enter their credentials if the authentication with the server fails, therefore the users account doesn’t get locked.

We are working through some work arounds for this to see if we can fix the AMO issue, but has anybody else struck this?

Anybody else fixed it?

I have been spending a lot of time lately working with SAS Strategic Performance Management and the Batch Maintenance Facility (BMF).

The BMF enable you to automatically create SPM Scorecards by uploading .csv files and can automate the creation or amendment of SPM:

• Scorecards
• Elements (i.e metric, goals etc)
• Attributes (i.e Descriptions, Links etc)
• Cells (i.e Actuals, Targets etc)

Importantly BMF utilises the SPM API and loads via the webserver, rather than doing a direct SQL insert into the MySQl backend, like the old speedyloader routines did. This means it is also supported SAS technical support.
Also BMF allows you to create, edit and delete both scorecard structures as well as the scorecard data which means you can use it to prototype your SPM (which is what we are doing) and load data (which we may do, although we may use the standard SPM DI Studio jobs instead, I will post our decision and logic once we have evaluated both)

Its also pretty quick, we are loading 200 scorecards and 1400 elements in under a minute and this is on a windows platform, with limited RAM available.

Interesting enough deleting them via the SPM interface takes upto 10 minutes.

In the background are a couple of SAS Macro’s you will need to install and then call to do the load. There is also some pretty good documentation available to help you get started, but I can’t seem to find a copy on any public SAS website.

So you will have to ask your friendly SAS account manager for the doco if you want to have a go.

I use Enterprise Guide a lot to model data before I expose it to the SAS Metadata Server to create prototype reports using Information Maps and Web Report Studio etc.

Its often said it is ok to make a mistake, but not to make it twice as you haven’t learnt from your mistakes, well here is one mistake that I constantly make when doing the above process (I blame my failing memory due to age).

Enterprise Guide allows you to create new datasets where the variable (column) name has a space in it. The SAS Metadata Server does not like these at all. The problem is it imports the metadata for the dataset fine, its just when you go to view the data all you see is the number of rows, but no columns and no data.

It doesn’t matter if you access the dataset in Enterprise Guide ( via the Metadata Server of course) or use view data in the SAS Management Console, all you see is blank rows.

But drag the exact same table directly into Enterprise Guide and its all hunky dory.

Of course I then spend ages going through metadata security assuming I have read metadata rights but not read data rights and that is whats causing the problem.

Finally I will work out that I had a space in the column name, fix it and wallah.  So I thought i’d blog about it just in case anybody else strikes the problem (or I at least remember to check my blog next time).

Oh and if you try and view data in Data Integration Studio you will get this error:

Warning: No rows returned by columns query for table DIM_ORG , no columns registered.
Warning: No rows returned by columns query for table DIM_ORG_OPERATIONS , no columns registered.

(at least one of the SAS interfaces reports that their is actually a problem, yah DI development team!)