Blogging about all things SAS

So here in sunny New Zealand a lot of customers are migrating to SAS 9.2 this year, but some won’t make it till next year (or beyond).

One customer I work with is in the next year camp.  We have just started the rollout of EG across the business and one of the things we encourage/mandate is that before a user gets access to EG they must have attended the SAS EG course. (EG is just so damn powerful/dangerous in a untrained users hands!)

But just been told SAS now only run courses using SAS 9.2 software.  So a dilemma or is it?

If we send our users on the EG 4.2 course I am concerned they will see all the things EG 4.1 doesn’t do and will focus on that, not the things EG 4.1 does very well (compared to other tools, SAS and non SAS)

But then again we need them trained.

EG 4.2 is a little different to EG 4.1 in navigation, functionality etc, but probably not enough that the user will get lost using 4.1 after being trained in 4.2.

(and I can understand SAS need to move training/courses to the latest version etc)

We have the SAS eLearning available to users (funnily enough still only SAS 9.1 based, wonder when that will change to 9.2?), so maybe self learning is enough?

Interested in your views, what are you doing for SAS 9.1 training?

Of course the customer is also currently recruiting BAU DI resource, so DI studio training will be a much bigger issue as DO Studio 3.4 compared to DI Studio 4.2 is a much bigger change.

Lastly if you know of any companies that sell SAS 9.1 training material (these have to have been developed independently of the SAS Education course notes of course and we will check!) that we could use to deliver internal training, let me know.

And following on with the theme of migrating SAS formats …..

SAS Support article here:

http://support.sas.com/kb/22/194.html

Outlines how to migrate formats across SAS systems.

Basically you just:

1) Export the formats to a transport file by using the follwing code:

  libname library 'location-of-existing-formats-catalog';
  libname trans xport 'transport-file-name';
  proc format library=library cntlout=trans.cntlfmt;

2) Import the formats from the transport file using the following code:
  libname library 'output-library-for-format-storage';
  libname trans xport 'transport-file-name-from-sending-site';
  proc format library=library cntlin=trans.cntlfmt;

This is of course assuming you don’t have the code that originally created teh formats, because you could just run that instead. But bet you dont as you have just searched for something that made you find this blog post

Following on from my post about needing to migrate Formats for EM projects to successfully migrate, I found a post in a SAS forum that helped me easily find the current format  paths on the old SAS 9.1 and new SAS 9.2 servers here (Chris from SAS helping people yet again!)

Basically you just go:

PROC OPTIONS OPTION=FMTSEARCH;

And the format paths will be listed.

In addition Chris also mentioned:

“Next, EG maintains a cached list of formats that it gathers from the SAS server. To make sure that your new format has a chance to be detected, go to Tools->Options->Data: Data General, and look at the “SAS Formats/Informats Cache”. If the button is enabled, click “Clear cache”. It will be enabled only if you have already used EG to browse the list of available formats during the current EG session.”

Another EG button I didn’t know existed!

If you are manually migrating EM models from SAS 9.1 to SAS 9.2 then it is a relatively easy task.

The process is:

• Copy the entire EM project structure to the new server (assuming you are going from like platform, i.e windows to like platform, i.e windows)
• In EM 6.1 create a new project and call it the same name as the one you copied and give it the same path
• When it tells you it already exists the accept the warning.

Wallah your EM project is now in SAS 9.2 / EM 6.1

(Warning you can;t send it back to EM 5.1)

I did strike a few gotach’s:

• I hadn’t migrated the SAS formats that the tables in EM model were using, so it didn’t import the tables, but also didn’t give me an error, they just didn’t show up.  Once i migrated the formats, it was fine (had to recopy the EM project files though)
• I got some horrendous SCL error when opening the Diagrams, so ended up deleting them, exporting them as xml objects in EM 5.1 and then importing them as new diagrams in EM 6.1

If you are ever looking for a list of SAS 9.2 procedures or trying to work out what SAS product you need to buy to use a certain procedure, you can find them here on the SAS support site:

SAS Procedures by Name
SAS Procedures by Product

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.

I love these motion charts that Google delivers:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/home

Unfortunately Government clients in NZ can;t use them as it is against the rules to store this data externally.

I know SAS JMP has this capability and you can export the motion charts as a flash file and embed it in the portal, but a portlet that allows these to be displayed dynamically in the Portal will be soooo cool.

Unfortunately even the new graph engine we are moving to doesnt provide these.

So need to move this from an idea to a delivery….

When connecting to SAS Enterprise Miner 5.x on SAS 9.1.x you normally entered a connection string that was the EM servername followed by the port, with the standard port being :5199.

With SAS Enterprise Miner 6.1 on SAS 9.2 the standard port changed to :6412 (for a Lev1 environment)