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Blogging about all things SAS |
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 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!)
I was using Enterprise Guide the other day to merge some data into a single table and I needed to generate a unique sequence for a derived column.
I asked around for the best option and was told that using ‘_n_’in a datastep would do i, but of course this would have to be a custom code node, and I was using the Enterprise Guide filter and query wizard, which meant I would have to create a second step within my process flow.
No biggy, but within Oracle I would have just called the Sequence function and all would have been good,
Then our resident SAS Geek (note the removal of Uber) mentioned that I could use ‘Monotonic()’. So I created a new computed column in the query, added Monotonic() as the expression and Bob’s you uncle (or even Aunt these days) EG produced a unique sequence in the new column.
The Monotonic() function is apparently experimental in SAS 9.1. But was mentioned in a SUGI paper : Helpful Undocumented Features in SAS
And according to Wikipedia it is:
“In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function which preserves the given order.”
A great post from Stephen Daniel about the value of SAS Enterprise Guide over at his blog.
I have to agree with all his points, the only negative I would add is that its integration with the SAS Metadata Server is not where it should be, but it gets better every release, bring on EG 4.2!
EG is a no brainer for any user who has never coded in SAS and a must have for any data analysts worth their salt.
However I have always struggled to persuade seasoned SAS Programmers to make the move. Apart from Graphs, they can always wack out code faster than they can use EG (and I have even tried a few shoot out’s to prove the point).
However with EG projects no being included in Metadata Impact analysis, the improved security capabilities EG allows and the licensing benefits compared to a fully loaded Base SAS PC, corporations are starting to make the decision for them.
Having said that the self proclaimed “SAS Uber Geek” in New Zealand has almost seen the light regarding SAS Data Integration Studio, so maybe he will see some value in EG will be next, and if he does I will be sure to post immediately.