Blogging about all things SAS

When I posted earlier about migrating Enterprise Miner models from SAS 9.1.3 to SAS 9.2 Alex Anglin from SAS quite rightly posted a comment mentioning that you should use Proc Migrate to move any dependent datasets if you are moving from a 32 bit server environment to a 64 bit server environment.

It got me thinking about how you can tell if the datasets you are using have been migrated correctly.  I never got around to searching for an answer, but today I was running some code against one that obviously wasn’t as I got this int he SAS Log:

NOTE: Data file libname.dataset is in a format that is native to another host, or the file encoding does not match the session encoding. Cross Environment Data Access will be used, which might require additional CPU resources and might reduce performance.

So I am assuming there are more automated ways of working out if a Dataset is in the correct format (feel free to post a comment with any suggestions) but I thought this was a pretty cool message.

Every now and again I get to right some SAS code.

And every know and again I need to transform SAS dates, from Date/Time to Date9 or from Date to Date/Time etc.

Its one thing that I always end up looking at SAS support for the correct syntax.  So Im going to post each one I use here so I can find them easily.

SAS Date to Date/Time

To convert a SAS date to a SAS Date/Time, by adding a time of 00:00:00 to it use:

dhms(<date_variable_name>,0,0,0)

If you install the SAS 9.2 Addin for Microsoft 4.2 it disables your undo capability in Excel.

This happens in both office 2003 and 2007.

Seems it is a known issue since June 2009.

There is a work around to fix it here:

Problem Note 36601: Cannot undo changes in Microsoft Excel when the SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office is installed

There is also a related note here:

Usage Note 37701: Additional SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office configuration is required to restore functionality of the Undo button in Microsoft Excel

Which states it  “can be fixed by applying the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2 (TS2M2).”

I have been doing a number of installations of SAS 9.2 eBI / eDI over the last week, to get a bit of practice in.

When I did installs on VM instances everything worked fine.

But when I did the install on a native machine, none of the Web Apps (SAS Portal, Web Report Studio etc) would  deploy and I would just get an error when trying to access the url via a browser (i.e /SASPortal/).

Eventually I tracked it down to an issue with the IPv6 setting.

So I changed the setting in the wrapper.conf file under:

<sas-config-dir>/Lev1/Web/Applications/RemoteServices/

And changed the line:

wrapper.java.additional.6=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=false -Dmulticast_udp_ip_ttl=0

to become

wrapper.java.additional.6=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=false -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=true -Dmulticast_udp_ip_ttl=0

So effectively switching from IPv4 to IPv6.  Reboot the server and we are away.

No idea what IPv6 does so need to do some research.

Update: May 2010

There is some more detail on IPv4 vs IPv6 and SAS 9.2 in this tech support note:

Usage Note 37509: Using SAS® 9.2 successfully with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) in Microsoft Windows operating environments

So if you want to make friends again with your users (after peeing them off by making the change in my last blog post) you can make it easier for them to connect to different Metadata environments, without having to change the connection details within Enterprise Guide.

If you run Production / UAT / Development environments you can make it easy for users to start choose which environment they want before starting EG and thus removing the need to go through the conneciton wizard each time to change environments.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/enclient/61192/HTML/default/a003280786.htm

Creating Desktop Shortcuts for Different Profiles

After you have created profiles, you can associate a profile with a shortcut on the Windows desktop. This capability enables you to start SAS Enterprise Guide with a specific profile by clicking on a specific shortcut. You can also start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile by using a desktop shortcut.

To associate a profile with a desktop shortcut, follow these steps:

1. Create a shortcut for the file SEGuide.exe. By default, it will be in the directory C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2.
2. Right-click on the shortcut that you created and select Properties.
3. To start SAS Enterprise Guide by using a specific profile, add /profile:<profile name> at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /profile. If the profile name includes spaces, you must enclose the name in quotation marks:

   "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /profile:"SAS Metadata"

   To start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile, add /noprofile at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /noprofile:

   "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /noprofile

4. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
5. You can now rename and move the shortcut to the desktop.

Don’t let them store their user name and password against their connection profile, thus making them type it in each time they connect.

To Disable the Option to Store Credentials in Profiles:

When you create a connection profile, the Connection Profile Wizard provides, by default, a check box named Save user ID and password in this profile. If a user selects this check box, then the user’s ID and password are stored in the user’s connection profile on the local file system. Saving the ID and password in the profile allows users to reconnect in the future without entering these values again.

Follow these steps to remove the Save user ID and password in this profile check box from the Connection Profile Wizard and require the manual entry of credentials:

1. On the host of the SAS Metadata Server, open in a text editor the file omaconfig.xml.
2. Change the value of the option SASSEC_LOCAL_PW_SAVE from 1 (or Y or T) to 0 (or N or F).
3. Save and close the file.
4. Restart the SAS Metadata Server as directed in the SAS Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide.

After you change the setting for this option and restart the metadata server, each client uses the previous setting for its first connection. The client then discovers the revised setting and conforms to that revised setting for subsequent connections.

If you change the setting to disallow saved credentials, and credentials are already present in a user’s connection profile, those credentials must be manually removed.

So you will have noted that you need to do this when you first install or they will have their username.password stored the first time they tick the store details box.

And of course if you have a need for a high level of security then this change is probably a good change.

In SAS 9.2 two different typos of connection profiles are stored for each user, one for windows applications (AMO, EG etc) and the pother for Java applications (DI Studio, Info Map Studio etc).

Java Applications:

Connection profiles are stored on the hosts of the desktop applications at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\SAS\MetadataServerProfiles. In the Windows Vista operating environment, the path is C:\Users\user name\AppData\Roaming\SAS\MetadataServerProfiles. The names of the profiles use the file extension.swa.

Windows Applications:

These profiles are stored in the ConfigurationV42.xml file in the users home directory C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\SAS\MetadataServerProfiles.

And of course recommended good practice is to only change these files via the profile editing capability provided within each of the SAS client applications.

Did an update to my 9.2 install depot and it looks like STM M1 is out.

Was talking to somebody the other day about the future of BI.  For me the next phase for one of our projects is:

• Google search integration
• Mashups
• More self service
• Better targetted dashboarding
• Strategy map visualisation
• Process flow visualisation
• Alerts

But it was quite rightly pointed out these are all capabilities that have been around for a while and none of them were innovations.

Then we got onto a discussion about Portals and personalisation.  And we came to the realisation  that BI Portal capabilities have fallen way behind the current round of website capabilities.

• Where are the Google style single page, let me tell you what I want and you show me?

• Where are the full personalisation like Yahoo where I can drag and drop things on my page, display whatever I want where I want, without the need for somebody else to build it?

• Where are the Google/Yahoo style desktop widgets/gadgets/(insert word here)gets

• Where is the syndication, let me tell you what I like and then tell me when you have it

• Where are the collaboration capabilities like Blogs/Twitter, let me show everybody when I have created or found something usefull

• Where are the social network capabilities, aka facebook, where content is only part of the community

If our target audience for BI is the the masses, then these are the capabilities they are used to using on a daily basis.  Who knows what will be next, buy isn’t BI capabilities already behind?

So ok starting with a topic of portal personalisation, I quickly got off topic into a whole raft of capabilities, or did I?  Isn’t that what portals are all about, personalising content to meet a users needs and expectation.