We have been doing some trouble shooting with the new Grid environment, and one of the guys on the customers site found this great piece fo SAS code:
%put _all_;
Run it in EG and the log will tell you a whole heap about what and where you are running your code on!
Example results from SAS 9.2 (GRID)
Been flat out for the last few weeks on various SAS Projects, and not many on the SaasInct side unfortunately.
One of the projects is getting prepared for a major upgrade to SAS 9.2 from SAS 9.1.
Looks like the SAS 9.2 install will be going ahead June or July, and then into migration.
Whats a bet that SAS announce SAS 9.3 in July!
Sods law they do. Although it always pays to wait for M1 at least and a few other customers to iron out the migration issues, so wont make a difference to this project.
http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/gridmgr/index.html
Grid Computing in SAS 9.2, Third Edition
http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/grid/grid_testingbench.pdf
http://blogs.sas.com/supportnews/index.php?/archives/126-Demystifying-SAS-Grid-Computing.html
Paper 098-2009 - Data Integration in a Grid-Enabled Environment
Cheryl Doninger, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC Nancy Rausch, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC
One of the most experienced SAS installer/architects I know has finally decided to add his wisdom to the blog space!
Michael Dixon from Scorpio has decided to pen his experiences dealing with implementing SAS software in a myriad of customer environments over at :
http://scorpiosoftware.blogspot.com/
Check it out when you get a chance!
(ps. ignore any posts around October as he will no doubt be blogging through tears as Australia loses the Rugby world cup to New Zealand in the final 
SAS Grid computing has been around for a while, and while there is a lot of information available on SAS Grid, I found it incredibly hard to get a succinct view on how you would and wouldn’t deploy SAS Grid in an environment.
This series will outline what I found. I will add each article as I have time over the coming weeks.
Articles:
Doing some work to figure out how to remove the Edit tab for a user in WRS 4.3.
Found this table of roles for WRS on the SAS Support site here:
Predefined Roles and Capabilities for SAS Web Report Studio
By the way the trick on the edit tab is to make sure PUBLIC doesnt have access to the WRS roles, which is does seem to by default.
“Note: By default, the PUBLIC group is a member of both the Web Report Studio: Report Creation and the Web Report Studio: Report Viewing roles. So, when you are ready to restrict access to specific capabilities, remember to remove PUBLIC (which includes all users in your deployment) from the applicable roles.”
Usage Note 30789: Implementing the most basic view-only access to reports in SAS® Web Report Studio
| Capability | Report Viewing | Report Creation | Advanced | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | ||||
| Comments | X | X | X | |
| X | X | X | ||
| Allow Direct Access to Information Maps1 | X | X | X | |
| Allow Direct Access to Cubes2 | X | X | X | |
| Allow Direct Access to Tables2 | ||||
| Promote WRV to WRS | X | X | X | |
| Refresh Data | X | X | X | |
| Modify Repository | X | X | X | |
| OLAP | ||||
| Drill | X | X | X | |
| Drill to Detail | X | X | X | |
| Expand and Collapse | X | X | X | |
| Expand and Collapse All | X | X | ||
| Output | ||||
| Save | X | X | X | |
| X | X | |||
| Export | X | X | ||
| Schedule Own Report | X | X | ||
| Report Creation | ||||
| Create Report | X | X | ||
| Basic Edit | X | X | ||
| Aggregate or Detail | X | |||
| Select All Data | X | X | ||
| Select Data in View | X | X | ||
| Copy Section2 | X | X | ||
| Advanced Report Creation | ||||
| Create Cascade Reports | ||||
| Create Report Links | X | |||
| Create Remote Application Report Links2 | X | |||
| Advanced Edit | X | |||
| Update Resources3 | X | |||
| Advanced Scheduling | ||||
| Distribute | X | |||
| Save Archive | X | |||
| Schedule Any Report | X | |||
| Schedule Folder | X | |||
| Administrative | ||||
| Manage Distribution List | ||||
| 1 If you are using (or if you migrated from) SAS Web Report Studio 4.2, then the name of this capability is Open Maps as Reports.2 This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.
3 If you are using (or if you migrated from) SAS Web Report Studio 4.2, then the name of this capability is Repair Report. |
||||
In order to be functional, some capabilities have prerequisites. Following is an explanation of each capability and prerequisites for certain capabilities:
If you are using (or if you migrated from) SAS Web Report Studio 4.2, then the name of this capability is Open Maps as Reports.
This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.
By default, this capability is not assigned to any roles because it would allow users to bypass BI row-level permissions. If you have not implemented BI row-level permissions, then consider adding this capability to the same roles to which Allow Direct Access to Cubes is assigned.
This capability is new in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.
The Report Creation: Basic Edit capability is a prerequisite for this capability. In SAS Web Report Studio, the Include Member with Only Missing Values menu item is available only for multidimensional data sources. The Suppress Empty function in the Advanced Edit capability is required in order for users of multidimensional data sources to view and use the Include Member with Only Missing Values menu item under the Data Menu in SAS Web Report Studio.
One of the sessions I got a lot out of at the SAS Global Forum was Margaret Crevar’s session where she outlined what options existed for tuning SAS on Windows 2008.
Some recommendations I noted where:
One of the areas Margaret covered was the issues with file cache within Windows 2008. Apparently Microsoft has re-written the file cahce system in Windows 2008 and R1 and then again in Windows 2008 R2. Both of these versions have major problems with SAS environments that have a high I/O footprint. SAS have raised the issue with Microsoft but have yet to have a resolution.
Interesting point was we experienced the same issue in Windows 2003:
Problem Note 36664: Potential issues with heavy SAS® I/O workloads on Windows 2003, 32- or 64-bit operating systems
You can read an excellent paper Margaret has authored at:
370-2011: Configuration and Tuning Guidelines for SAS®9 in Microsoft Windows Server 2008
Some other papers you may want to reference are:
Was working with a customer last week doing a partial migration across SAS environments.
I needed to migrate a number of users and groups, not a large number so was easy enough to move them manually.
I thought I saw a while ago some automated tools to assist with migrating users and groups, but do you think I could find them again!
Anyway after a quick tweet of frustration Paul from Metacoda came through with a reply pointing me to:
Legend!
We have been looking to upgrade a client to SAS 9.2 and at the same time move to the clients corporate IT standard of virtualising the environments.
The client has standardised on vSphere and I thought great SAS 9.2 supports vSphere (as much as the following SAS support page say’s SAS supports virtualisation)
SAS® Product Support for Virtualization Environments
But after talking to Oracle about Weblogic support on VMware the answer is no, Oracle do not support any Oracle product on VMWare.
To quote from Oracle Metalink note: 249212.1 (found on a comment in response to another blog) :
“Oracle has not certified any of its products on VMware virtualized environments. Oracle Support will assist customers running Oracle products on VMware in the following manner: Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware. ”
“If a problem is a known Oracle issue, Oracle support will recommend the appropriate solution on the native OS. If that solution does not work in the VMware virtualized environment, the customer will be referred to VMware
for support. When the customer can demonstrate that the Oracle solution does not work when running on the native OS, Oracle will resume support, including logging a bug with Oracle Development for investigation if required.”
So what does Oracle Weblogic support in terms of virtualisation? OVM of course. Does SAS support OVM, of course not! (well actually this doesn’t seem to be true more on that later)
If we look at SAS Supported UNIX Operating Environments we see that Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) is not on the list. If we look at SAS Support for Alternative Operating Systems we see that OEL is not support but SAS will offer “best efforts” support.
The question is does OVM require OEL?
Well the answer is no, according to this Oracle VM Server for x86 FAQ OVM support Red Hat Linux (REHL). So in theory we can run Weblogic on REHL in a OVM environment.
Is this supported by Oracle, yes it seems from all the links above.
Is it supported by SAS, well waiting to here back officially, but remember this SAS® Product Support for Virtualization Environments states that they support any virtualisation (but have the same get out of jail free card as Oracle), so that should be a yes, SAS should support the use of OVM!
Now the real issue if after installing SAS eBI, using Oracle Weblogic on RHEL 5 within a Oracle VM environment we strike a problem, who the heck do we ring first? (you know its going to be SAS Support right
I was doing some testing of the new Addin to Microsoft Office (AMO) 4.3/M3 a week or two ago and specifically the addin for Outlook.
When trying to open a SAS Report (.srx) in Outlook we got this error.
Looks like the SAS AMO 4.3 plugin relies on the Web Report Studio web services that automatically get installed when you install the Web tier.
The issue of course is this customer is only using AMO and has not deployed any of the web tier, but in good optimal practice are using Information Maps and .srx reports (created via Enterprise Guide).
So looks like using Outlook to access these .srx is out.
Now I know Kiwi’s (New Zealanders) are known for their number 8 wire approaches and also being frugal (a large number are of course descended from the Scots , so a number of NZ customers have purchased BI Server and only implemented the SAS Server, Enterprise Guide and AMO, as that meets their current needs. In these cases it looks like using the Outlook version is out of the question.
And with SAS announcing an AMO/EG only offering again use of .srx reports is out im guessing.
Anyway one positive is after playing briefly with the Outlook capability on my test server, I can actually see the Outlook capability taking over from the Portal eventually. Why would users want to login to the Portal to get their reports when they can access them directly from within Outlook where they spend so much of their time?
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