SAS Portlets, Widgets, Themes and Tutorials for sale

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?

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.

In SAS 9.1 you can’t incrementally load a SAS OLAP Cube, the load job effectively deletes the physical cube files and recreates them.

This is a slight problem if a user is actually viewing the OLAP cubes, as they will be locked and the cube build will fail.

Michelle Wilkies (good kiwi lass by the way) describes in the SAS Support paper How to Update Cubes on an Active SAS® OLAP Server how to go about ‘disconnecting’ the user before the build, but what if the users (persistent little buggers that the are) actually want the information and so keep logging back on.

Well you have some problems.

We thought about stopping the OLAP server, but in our case we only wanted to rebuild (i.e stop access) to some cubes, not all, stop the OLAP server and users can’t access any cube.

We thought about changing security rights on each cube to bock users, but it is time consuming.

We thought about splitting the OLAP Schema’s out into multiple schema’s based on subject area, This way we could change security rights on a single schema, update all the cubes for that subject and wallah.

But the issue is SAS Portal and OLAP Viewer both give nasty errors (rather than nice user friendly ones) if the OLAP Schema is not available.

Screenshot - OLAP Viewer with no Security rights

So the Portal OLAP Viewer shows a blank view (and no the cube doesn’t have dimensions called A and B)

Portal OLAP View - No Security

The OLAP Viewer shows a lovely Java error.

So what happens if you create a second OLAP Server/Service (with two OLAP Schema’s of course) and pause one of those, well the Portal doesn’t show an error, but the OLAP Viewer still does.

OLAP Server Stopped - Portlet

Nice blank OLAP Viewer portlet

Screenshot - OLAP Viewer with OLAP Server stopped

But still an ugly Java error in the OLAP Viewer.

So bring on incremental OLAP loads in SAS 9.2 I say!

A SAS stored process is a SAS program that is hosted on a server and described by metadata.  One of the major values of stored processes is that they can be consumed by most SAS reporting tools, including SAS Portal, Web Report Studio, Enterprise Guide and the Addin for Microsoft Access.

I have always been a big fan of using them as I believe they are great for creating predefined business rules which users can consume in their reports without having to define any code.

There is an interesting paper at SUGI 31  Making your own Balanced Scorecard using the SAS Information Delivery Portal that describes how a combination of Stored Processes and the SAS Portal can be used to present users with a Balanced Scorecard.

Now if it was me I would have used SAS Strategic Performance Management , but then I hate reinventing the wheel.

But I think the paper shows how with a combination of SAS Portal and Stored Processes, ”there ain’t much you can’t do.

With a hat tip to Joyce Norris-Montanari there is a great blog post over at Victor Fehlberg’s Tech Postings called What is DataFlux?

Victor takes us through a walk through of cleaning up address data using Dataflux, with screenshots and all!

I am always amazed at how many companies recognise they have a data quality issue, and then relegate it to a ’spare time’ project, rather than a priority.

As they say “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” just as important is my own “any decision based on crap data is likely to be a crap decision”