SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

On a project I am working on we upgraded our SAS licenses from Data Integration Server to Enterprise Data Integration Server.

We were really impressed with the capabilities of Dataflux, and as we were using SAS DI Studio in anger to populate our warehouse, the idea of integrating the Dataflux rules into our ETL processes also appealed.

We had a demo of Dataflux version 8, which looks sexy and has a lot of great features (which you would expect from one of the top 3 data quality tools in the world).

Imagine our disappointment when we got the CD’s to find we had been shipped Dataflux 7.0, not version 8 that was demo’d.

Simple mistake we thought, so onto to our capable SAS account manager.

Well we were wrong, it seems that Dataflux 7.0 is certified (and works) with DI Studio, Dataflux 7.1 and 8.x will be supported in SAS 9.2.

Tricks for young players I suppose., but then again I am not so young anymore…..

I am sure Dataflux 7.0 and  DI Studio will do what we need, but still slightly disappointing.

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)

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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.

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!

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?