Blogging about all things SAS

Looks like it will be a great SAS Forum in Sydney next month, as it is a sell out with 3 weeks to go!

http://www.sas.com/offices/asiapacific/sp/news/releases/SFANZ2010.html?utm_medium=RSS&utm_source=AustraliaNZ_PressRelease

It is always interesting how quickly answers from Tech support move to fixed in the next release once a new release is out.

Some of the peopl I talk to regular are telling me they are sometimes getting fixed in SAS 9.3 in response to issues now.

I came across this note today on the SAS Support site:

http://support.sas.com/techsup/pcn/openvms93.html

“Product Change Notifications from SAS

Statement of support for Windows on Itanium and Open VMS Itanium

April 2010 Due to changing market conditions, SAS 9.3 will drop support for Windows on Itanium (W64) and Open VMS Itanium (IVMS, VMI) operating systems. SAS will continue to assist customers in migrating to other operating systems. Note: SAS 9.2 will continue to support these operating systems.

Modified Technical Support

Upon release of SAS 9.4, Technical Support will be provided at Level B and will follow the schedule as outlined in the Technical Support Policies.”

So there you go SAS 9.3 and SAS 9.4!

But the good thing is that SAS are giving customers a good heads up on the future direction of the product and associated platform support and that is a good thing.

Bob from IBM posted a comment a while ago I missed (sorry Bob) to my post about SAP/Teradata or SAS/Teradata/SAP mergers.

Well with SAP buying Sybase that gives them the database they needed.

They missed out on Analytics when you guys snapped SPSS.

So that leaves either a SAS/Teradata play (we could even through ESRI into it to make it spicy) or a SAS/SAP play.

Given the collaboration between SAS/Teradata via their in-database processing and Teradata’s sponsorship of SAS events (well in Australasia at least oh and while you are there scroll to the bottom and let me know what you think of the extra a in SaasInct, i’m not so sure i’m loving it) then a merger would technically be simple and there are not a lot of competing capability apart from Data Mining and Marketing Automation etc.

The SAS/SAP one is interesting cause it gives them a world leading Analytics capability, but competes with BO.  Then again buying multiple competing products never stopped Uncle Larry at Oracle.

The key is why would SAS offer themselves to SAP, as Dr Jim will obviously choose if and when he sells and also to whom.

The SAP/Teradata one would give SAP a form of Analytics, but with them buying Sybase (and paying so much) the value they would receive would be so much less than before.

And I still havent discounted HP buying some software capability to get into the game, but with the market convergence still happening then they are losing the ability to get enough pieces to compete I think.

One of the things I lost track of was the number of companies SAS has purchased since I left.  It wasn’t until I was doing some research around SAS solution for Risk that I started to see a whole raft of new companies and capability.  Need to find time to track them all down and blog them out of interest.

So anyway after all that no real answer or insight on who and what next, which I had that Octopus from the Soccer World Cup and then I could invest in shares and retire to blog full-time

If you are using Dataflux as part of your SAS 9.2 Enterprise Data Integration (eDI) license then when you downlaod (or receive) your install depot you will have DF Studio 8.1 and Dataflux Integration Server 8.1.

The current Dataflux release is 8.2 and it is certified with SAS 9.2 so make sure you get a support login to the Dataflux website and download the 8.2 install executable and install that version.

Got a curly one from a customer yesterday, so thought I would throw it out to the wider community (and Chris from SAS to see if there is an answer.

So in Web Report Studio you can have the prompts that have been selected (i.e City = Auckland) automatically displayed on a report.

The customer is of course not using WRS but is using Enterprise Guide, Stored Processes and Office Addin.

They worked out a way to have Stored Processes that are delivered via Excel/AMO to display the selected prompts when executed, and we could use this concept in EG to effectively create two list reports (one for report content and one for selected prompts) and combine them in report.

But I was wondering if any knew of a way to have the prompts shown in a graph output etc?

So looks like the new M3 BI Clients are now looking to ship in October, so slipped into Q4.

But I do believe that Enterprise Guide might be out a little earlier than the other BI clients.

We will wait and see (not much else we can do

So we have a few customers where we have installed SAS 9.2 M2 on either on a live or a test environment.

We wanted to test applying the M3 maintenance release before the 4.3 clients come out as there are dependent.

So the process is to apparently run the download manager again and the install depot will be updated.

But before you do this you will need to talk to your account manager to get a new license code, or the download manager wont update the install depot.

Is it me or just this seem like one extra unnecessary step to apply a maintenance release for software a customer has paid for?

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick on this one and this is not required?

And of course when searching for documentation on installing/applying the M3 release you get nada.

As I have mentioned before SAS are going to release a new set of Business Intelligence clients under the 4.3 umbrella sometime before the end of the year.

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the new capability this week and one thing that really peeked my interest is the new integration with Microsoft Outlook.

We have been pushing the use of SAS Portal as the primary way of accessing our reporting content, but users have always gravitated towards using the Office Addin and access the data via Excel and Information Maps.

I think the integration with Outlook coming in 4.3 will move the majority of users off Excel and into outlook.  The key benefit is that this will move from some of the manually collated Excel content to the automated content we have created.

Why do I think this will happen?

Well because it removes the issue of having to login to the Portal or open Excel to access reports and data.  Users are permanently logged into Outlook, check there emails on a regular basis and therefore accessing their reporting content from there will just be easier.

The other thing I liked was the ability to embed BI Dashboard widgets into Outlook sidebars.  We have played around with creating desktop widgets for SAS but apart from being a cool demo I have never been convinced that people would use them in anger (and therefore we wouldn’t sell many

But if they are embedded in Outlook and therefore access is easy and ubiquitous then I think they may actually be used.

One thing I still think was lacking was the way the BI Dashboards are embedded in the SAS Portal, still some need for our !sasInct Flash Graph portlets for while yet.

But I do think the actual BI Dashboard application flash interface itself is pretty cool.

Anyway there is some details of whats coming in a paper done as SAS Forum 2010 – Better Decision Making with SAS® Enterprise Business Intelligence and Microsoft Outlook.

Also there is a pdf version of a presentation with some more details on the SAS BI 4.3 release and screenshots Enterprise Guide 4.3 and Other Upcoming SAS Releases

The only thing it doesn’t tell us is when it will actually arrive.

Struck a problem converting some Enterprise Guide projects from 4.1 (SAS 9.1.3) to 4.2 (SAS 9.2) around date prompts.

The EG projects have a large bunch of custom code nodes (so hate those!) and they are all running some macro’s that use a date prompt.

Of course they work fine in 4.1 but fail in 4.2.

Traced it to a change in the way date prompts work in eG 4.2 via this SAS Support note:

Problem Note 36581: Date and Datetime parameters might cause syntax errors after project migration to SAS® Enterprise Guide® 4.2

Followed the fix below and updated the date variable in the code from &date to “&date”d  and the date is back on!

For example, in earlier versions of SAS Enterprise Guide, the correctly generated %LET statement might be %let datevar = '01jan2009'd;. However, after migrating projects to 4.2, the statement is incorrectly generated as %let datevar = 01jan2009;.

To circumvent the problem, open the query in 4.2 and edit the filter by adding quotes around the parameter. For example, use "&YourDateVar"d for dates, and "&YourDateTimeVar"dt for datetime parameters.