Blogging about all things SAS

We are still getting the infamous “Parser has reached the entity expansion limit “64,000″ set by the application” when opening large Information Maps.

As per this tech support note:

Problem Note 20991: SAS® Information Maps with more than 999 data items might fail to open with the SAS Information Map Libname Engine (IMLE)
http://support.sas.com/kb/20/991.html

We have applied the hotfix and checked the config and it all applied as per the tech support note, but we still have the issue intermittently.

What we cant work out is we get this scenario:

• User A opens EG on PC and gets error on info map
• User B uses User A’s open EG client, reconnects to metadata as themselves and it info map opens ok.

• User B opens EG on their PC and info map opens ok
• User A uses User B’s open EG client, reconnects to metadata as themselves and it info map opens ok.

So we deduce that

• it is not the info map because some people can open it
• it sis not the server because some people can open it
• its not users A EG client, because it works for user B
• its not User A’s metadata security because it works on user B’s PC

So only think I can think of is cached files on the EG side, or memory issues on the server?

But as I said it is intermittent across environments, across users.  The only thing we do know is that it only happens on our very large Information Maps.

Any ideas?

I’m sitting the beta test for the SAS Business Intelligence certification tomorrow.

The beta version is a 3 hour and 15 minute exam, this is going to be interesting, exciting, scary, nerve racking……

And of course the opportunity has come at the last minute, so the chance to study is zilch!

We have been working on an idea for a new portlet, and I was interested in any feedback from the SAS community.

The idea is to enable users and portal administrators to layout the portal page via standard drag and drop and resize capabilities that you would expect with any Web personalisation (aka portal) capability.

To do this we have built a prototype of a portlet that then allows you to select other portlets and then darg and drop them on the page.  Once you have done that the layout is saved.

As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a quick and dirty vid:

So what do you think?

• Nothing but eye candy?
• Pretty cool, id buy that!
• mmm nice try but no cigar

Feel free to post a comment if you have one!

One of the things we know our users will not like when we move to SAS 9.2 is the removal of the tabs in Web Report Studio 4.2.

They make it so easy to see whats available and we make a lot of use of sections / tabs in our reports to reduce the number of reports we have to maintain.

I heard a rumour that tabs are back in Web Report Studio 4.3 (due out Q34 2010), but havent found any screenshots on the web to confirm this.

If you know let me know and make my users happy.

I caught up with James Foster from SAS Australia last week and got a bit of an insight into where the SAS products are going in the next few months.

At the moment we are at SAS 9.2 M3 for the SAS Platform (eBI, eDI, EM etc).

Later this year (Mid Q3 ish?) a new set of the BI Clients will be released under the 4.3 banner (so Enterprise Guide 4.3, Web Report Studio 4.3 etc). These clients will bring massive enhancements to the BI client functionality.

Two that I have already mentioned are the enhancements Chris has outlined will be coming in Enterprise Guide 4.3 here and the new BI Dashboards James mentioned at SUNZ earlier this year.

To leverage this new functionality you will need to be on SAS 9.2 M3, then install the desktop/developments clients and/or redeploy the new Web App versions.

James also mentioned that SAS 9.3 is currently under development as the next major release and maybe be out sometime next year.

Its great to see we don’t have to wait another 5 years (aka SAS 9.1 –> SAS 9.2) before SAS delivers new capability. I think given the BI competitors SAS (aka Oracle, SAP) have in the market the speed of development is going to be key.

Bring it on!