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?

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.

We are doing some work to enable Channels and WRS report scheduling in our SAS 9.1.3 environment.

Its a complete mare!

One of the issues we have struck is the inability to delete any packages you have published to a channel.  They just stay there forever.

In SAS 9.2 you get a utility that lets you delete these packages:

SAS 9.2 Using the Package Clean-Up Utility to Remove Packages

Luckily the friendly chaps at SAS tech Support mentioned that there is a SAS Toolpool entry for 9.1.3 that does teh same function.

So if you need to delete Archived Packages in SAS 9.1.3 channels, then as your friendly SAS dude for the toolpool entry.

The place you put your portlet files to automatically deploy them has changed in SAS 9.2.

In SAS 9.1 (windows) you used to place them here:

<sas-install-dir>\Program Files\SAS\Web\Portal2.0.1\DeployedPortlets

In SAS 92 (Windows) you need to place them here:

<sas-config-dir>\Lev1\Web\Applications\SASPortlets4.2\Deployed



So if you want to make friends again with your users (after peeing them off by making the change in my last blog post) you can make it easier for them to connect to different Metadata environments, without having to change the connection details within Enterprise Guide.

If you run Production / UAT / Development environments you can make it easy for users to start choose which environment they want before starting EG and thus removing the need to go through the conneciton wizard each time to change environments.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/enclient/61192/HTML/default/a003280786.htm

Creating Desktop Shortcuts for Different Profiles

After you have created profiles, you can associate a profile with a shortcut on the Windows desktop. This capability enables you to start SAS Enterprise Guide with a specific profile by clicking on a specific shortcut. You can also start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile by using a desktop shortcut.

To associate a profile with a desktop shortcut, follow these steps:

1. Create a shortcut for the file SEGuide.exe. By default, it will be in the directory C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2.
2. Right-click on the shortcut that you created and select Properties.
3. To start SAS Enterprise Guide by using a specific profile, add /profile:<profile name> at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /profile. If the profile name includes spaces, you must enclose the name in quotation marks:

   "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /profile:"SAS Metadata"

   To start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile, add /noprofile at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /noprofile:

   "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /noprofile

4. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
5. You can now rename and move the shortcut to the desktop.

So after playing with EG 4.2 for a few days in anger I have to say I like it.

Things I like:

• The new folder structure that 9.2 Metadata introduced, works a treat in EG to save projects, files etc
• New layout is good, especially the window with folder view, server view, task view etc in one
• The conditional logic is way cool!
• The status bar that gives you more details on what is running is great
• Function level security means its easier to roll out in a controlled way
• The project auto recover has saved me a few times already
• The prompting framework rocks
• Use of SAS/Access for PC file formats (if licensed) makes things faster
• Query wizard joins now clearly explain inner, left, right and outer joins
• Raft of additions around querying aggregated values, as well as detailed records
• Accessing Information Maps works fully, no more limited functionality
• Task templates rock, you can create all your graphs automatically using your default corporate styles/themes
• The kill button actually works, invaluable!

Things I still can’t get to grips with:

• Double clicking on a node opens the result table , not the query, still haven’t got used to that
  (update from Chris @ SAS “hold the Ctrl key when you double-click on a task/query node and EG will open the task dialog instead of the results.”)
• Tabs are gone and yes pulldown is better use of screen realestate (especially for big projects) but tabs were easy.
• F4 to get back to process flow view is now only works dependent on what you are viewing
• There is now a filter and sort option and a query options, almost got used to it though

Things that suck:

• Dependent prompts don’t work (create a Stored processes and they do though)

The team from SAS NZ did a great preso on whats new in SAS EG 4.2 at SUNZ this year, copy of overview paper here:

http://www.slideshare.net/sunznz/sas-enterprise-guide-whats-new

So after converting a few EG project from SAS 9.1/EG 4.1 to SAS 9.2/EG 4.2 I have found a few interesting experiences.

I have just posted my experience with the EG Migration Wizard

Once the EG project is in 4,2 format a few other things have surfaced:

• When importing MS Access or Excel files in the project, the import function has seemed to fundamentally changed, this caused a number of issues, specifically around importing date fields
• Also it changes the title of the import file node from the database or excel file name to the access table or excel sheet name.  A little frustrating when multiple excel spreadsheets are being imported and they are all based on sheet1!
• The query wizard has changed the way it handles calculations on calculated items, not sure exactly how, but query nodes that worked fine in 4.1 error in 4.2.  However once we recreated these calcs manually it all worked fine.

Little niggles and all can be fixed, but again don’t under estimate the amount of effort to get these things converted.

There is a migration wizard delivered with Enterprise Guide 4,2 (9.2) that enables you to convert your EG projects automatically when you upgrade.

It is a an exe file in your EG 4.2 directory.

This wizard scans the selected EG projects and allows you to do a global replace of Servers, Libraries and External files.

The alternative is to open each EG project and manually change these (or alternatively do a fully automated SAS 9.2 migration, where you dont change any of the server names, libnames or file paths

So I have found this wizard a bit hit and miss.  Don’t get me wrong it still saves you time, but I have found instances where it doesnt actually update the EG Projects (normally when trying to convert a lot of projects at once).

Also with project that have a lot of tabs, it sometimes forgets to do one.

Another issue is it changes the libname of a source table, bit if the query saves the result table in a permanent libname (i.e. not work) then it doesn’t seem to update those ones.

So all fixable and the wizard is better than no wizard, but don’t under estimated the effort required to convert these projects.