Archive for September, 2010

Deprecated = dead, nadda, gone burgers, elvis has left the building (and so has SAS 9.2 replication)

Sep
30

Paul posted a blog today “Farewell to the SAS 9.2 Replication Wizard” which outlined the fact SAS have announced that the replication capbility in SAS 9.2 is no longer supported.  (Usage Note 40834: The Replication Wizard in SAS® 9.2 has been deprecated)

Paul mentions it was probably lack of use that caused SAS to stop developing and supporting the replication capability, but im guessing that it was actually the fact that people used it and it didn’t work that caused the action.

Although replication was a pain to set-up, it seemed to be useful as part of the SAS 9.2 migration strategy, or alternatively intiating a new SAS environment.

What it was mean’t to allow you to do, was fully replicate an environment (say Development) to another Environment (say UAT or Prod) and automatically change all the pointers through the SAS environment to the new instance.  So for example automatically changing the name of the servers if you were moving environments across physical or virtual machines or changing userid’s, file paths, ports etc.

So for 9.2 migrations it made sense to create a blank Dev 9.2 environment, migrate the 9.1 production objects to it, test the Dev environment, then replicate the Dev environment upto UAT and Prod.

As Paul quite rightly highlights the only other option was partial migration, i.e exporting and importing SAS Packages and this option is not available for all SAS content (Portal pages and Portlets being one of them until BI 4.3 is out).  Its also a pain if you had to do it for 3 environments, not to mention the risk of the environments getting out of sync from day one (compared to day 99 ;-)

I know of one NZ site that took the replication approach for their migration, but unfortunately found the replication process didn’t change all references during the process, and so the environments got a little confused (to say the least).  Nothing worse than Production updating files or objects in Dev it seems.

So maybe this was one of the few sites using replication, and therefore there wasn’t enough of a user base to warrant making it work properly, but it does worry me when functionality gets de-supported like this (just thankful i’m not in the middle of a SAS 9.2 migration project that was relying on this feature and hope your not either!)

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SAS 9.1, Windows 2003, I/O and 32 bit limitations

Sep
29

Over the lastest year or two we have had ongoing issues running SAS 9.1 on 32 bit windows.

Main two issues that constantly arise are:

  • Metadata server exceeding addressable memory in 32 bit windows and crashing
  • I/O errors intermittently reading/writing SAS datasets

We have tried all the SAS “support” tools to reduce the size of our metadata server.  The final answer seems to be we will have to create a new one from scratch and export/import the object we need to retain.

We have also “tweaked” the windows file cache to reduce the I/O errors due to the windows file buffers being written faster than they can be cleared.  On that note I found this tech support note the other day:

Problem Note 36664: Potential issues with heavy SAS® I/O workloads on Windows 2003, 32- or 64-bit operating systems

Which I paraphrase as saying dont use Windows 2003 if you want to actually process any reasonable amount of data.

Of course the real answer it seems is to move to SAS 9.2 and 64 bit Windows 2008, but it does make me wonder how long it would take before you blew the limits of that operating system?

And shouldn’t the SAS environment at least tell you when it was experiencing these issues, rather than just abending so rudely?

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Speeding up Web Report Studio (9.1/3.1) by jumping in puddles

Sep
28

When SAS 9.2 was released one of the changes SAS made was to change the default setting for WRS from using a standard workspace server to a pooled workspace server.

This was to improve performance as pooled workspace servers remove the requirement for sas executables (sas.exe) to start and stop for each query, and therefore speeding up environments with lots of small queries.

SAS issued this tech support note:

Usage Note 39065: Documented best practices and other resources for improving the performance of SAS® Web Report Studio

Which outlines how to setup pooled workspace servers in SAS 9.1.

It also outlines a few other performance related changes you may want to try.

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Helping EG users to help themselves (and kill rogue SAS sessions)

Helping EG users to help themselves (and kill rogue SAS sessions)
Sep
27
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I was lucky enough to sit though a presentation from CBA at the SAS Fourm in Sydney last month that described a set of tools they had created to manage their SAS enviornment and specifically the SAS processes that were running on their servers.

I know of a few other large SAS sites that have built there own custom administration tools to help automate the administration of their SAS environments.

When talking to the smaller SAS sites they do not have the development time to build an equivalent solution specifically for their site, and there is not a lot of out-of-the-box capability from SAS.

So of course we thought tada opportunity for some SaasInct magic!

We have been working on a set fo utilities that will help SAS sites manage their SAS processes.  The first two components are:

  • A server side admin script
  • An Enteprise Guide addin

We are beta testing them at the moment, but they are designed to enable rouge SAS processes to be killed automatically by the admin script based on some parameters (i.e SS processes running for 4 days or more and of course exclude server processes such as object spawners etc).

It also allows EG users to kill their own processes via an EG plugin.  This removes the ned for users to have to ring a admin person to kill them when they have exited (in a not very nice way) from EG on their PC and the process is still running on the server.

And importantly they can only see and kill their own processes:

We are thinking about adding a monitoring and kill portlet (maybe useful for admin’s?) and a DI Studio addin.

Will post when it is all up on the site for sale of course ;-)

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Upgrading to SAS 9.2 Foundation M3

Upgrading to SAS 9.2 Foundation M3
Sep
24
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We have been doing some testing of the upgrade to SAS 9.2 M3 in preperation for SAS BI 4.3.

Have to say the upgrade was simple and painless.

Download the new install depot (using donwload manager so it only downloaded updated files not the whole 30Gb again), then run the SAS Deployment Wizard.

You will be presented with some great screens that tell you what you are going from and to for each SAS product:

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SAS BI 4.3 Clients slipped till November 2010 (ish), ho hum

Sep
24

Heard a rumor today that the SAS BI 4.3 client release (WRS, BIS Dashboards etc) have slipped until November (ish).

Makes it hard to promise delivery to clients when you are relying on the new functionality, ho hum.

Perhaps Chris of EG fame should take over ;-)

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ITRM 3.2 – Early Impression – A tale of two tails

Sep
23

So got the ITRM 3.2 media and did a quick trial install.

No standard plan for ITRM was available in the install files so had to ask a favour of our friendly presales dudes to get their other friendly dude in the office to generate one for me.

Why can’t I generate my own install plans as a customer?

But as always the NZ guys came through quickly and the plan arrived.

The install on Windows 2008 R2 was painless, with the installer installing all the necessary components, SAS Foundation, Metadata, ITRM Client and Server and even deployed flawlessly into the Oracle Weblogic 10.3 instance I had cooked previously.

So we are now working through how to create the IT Data Mart, load the SCOM logs and then access the prebuilt reporting suite.

The good news is it looks like the ITRM content is all out of the box again (aka ITRM 2,7) so my rant about the ITRM 3.1 product just being a licensed bundle of DI and eBI with no content and no real how to assemble instructions is now null-in-void.

Two points (segway to blog title ;-) I note about my first look at ITRM:

  1. The Data Integration side is delivered by a new ITRM Client (Fat Java client like Management Console etc) but the development team has obviously taken the DI Studio 4.21 core and extended it.  Good work, means we are familiar with the UI and they have leveraged all the development (and more importantly the testing) before them.
  2. The reporting side is a different story however.  ITRM comes with a reporting interface called Gallery Manager.  Now don’t get me wrong Gallery Manager is cool, it has coverflow capabilities, great drag and drop capability and cool integration with Enterprise Guide.  But the issue is why would they create a new reporting UI and capability rather than just reuse whats in WRS and BI Dashboards, or at least enhance the eBI capability with these features? Having said that I haven’t seen the eBI 4.3 clients yet (are they still scheduled for October I wonder?) so maybe I am talking through my preverbal.   Only time will tell.

So anyway lets see how it all goes once we have these SCOM logs loaded.

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Default Portlets in SAS 9.2 M3

Default Portlets in SAS 9.2 M3
Sep
22
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The default portlets you get with eBI server, SAS 9.2, M3 are:



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SAS BI Dashboards 4.3 – They rock! Bring it on!

Sep
17

I have mentioned before that SAS are releasing an upgraded set of BI Clients/Capabilities under the 4.3 banner this year.  SAS Enterprise Guide and Office Addin 4.3 are already out.

I saw a demo of the new SAS BI Dashboards 4.3 this week.  I was blown away!

As a bit of background its interesting to note how the BI Dashboards came about.

When I worked for SAS ( a few years ago now) I was around when SAS 9.1 was released.  It was a major change for SAS and they released some great functionality, Web Report Studio, Information Maps, Office addin etc.

It really enabled us in pre-sales to step up and demo solutions that could compete against Business Objects, Cognos etc who were leaders at the time.  If you added the true single integrated metadata platform SAS released as the foundation of SAS 9.1 it was a great competitive offering.

But in the 6 years between SAS 9.1 and SAS 9.2 the other BI vendors of course innovated and we started to see the release of powerful dashboarding capabilities, especially with products such as Business Objects Xcelsius.

Now we had SPM and tricky ways of putting Stored Processes into portal pages but to put it politely when we came up against these tools and the major focus of the customer was delivering dashboards we got our backsides whomped.

Then one of the SAS consultants built a dashboarding capability and released it in the SAS Toolpool (an internal area for SAS code that can be used on consulting engagements but aren’t supported if used at a customer site).  The difference with this tool pool entry was rather than being a simple piece of SAS code or capability it was a full dashboarding solution and had great documentation.

The downside was as it was written very quickly and by one person ( I think) so it had a few unplanned features.

The next step was SAS included it as a supported addin (for SAS 9.1).  So same code base but just supported by Tech Support.  So a good step but still had a few issues, one of which pretty much made it unusable for large scale implementations.

Then in SAS 9.2 / 4.2 they tidied it up quote a bit, included it int he base install, but still it was a little clumsy.

Now with the imminent 4.3 release they have pretty much nailed it.  Things I think rock:

  • Flash interface with a very nice UI
  • Great drag and drop capability
  • Built in comment management
  • Built in alerting
  • Ranging capabilities that remind me of SPM(STM), which I have always loved.
  • Integration with Microsoft Outlook
  • Embedded in AMO
  • Great variety of widgets, including Spark Lines, and automated history/time series play back

As always still a few extra things I would love to see included, but enough for them included in the new product to recommend it to most of my customers.

It fills that gap of interactive dashboarding that SAS has always struggled to provide and so many middle management and executives are now demanding.

As an aside I do wonder where this leaves STM, as apart from Strategy maps, I don’t see a lot else missing between STM and BI Dashboards.

Only downside is you need to license eBI Server to get the BI Dashboards, not BI, but then again it allows you to leverage the full BI capability of SAS so why wouldnt you.

There is an overview of the SAS BI Dash-boards 4.3 in a SA Fourm paper from 2010 titled “Interactive Dashboards: Powered by Flash and the SAS Programmer”.

Can’t wait to get hold of it when it is production (next month maybe? ;-)

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SAS WRS 3.1, sub total drill downs – they doen’t!

Sep
10

We make a lot of use of summary WRS cross tab reports which are then linked to detailed WRS reports.

This enables users to run a summary report, and then click on a value and drill to the detailed transactions that make up the total.

One of the issues with this in WRS 3.1 (SAS 9.1) is when a user clicks on a sub-total within the WRS report they often drill to a blank report or a report that doesn’t show valid transactions for the summary value.

We eneded up having to train our users to never click on a sub-total to drill down.

There is a usage note at http://support.sas.com/kb/40/708.html that describes when drilling down on sub-totals will and won’t work.

Good to know when this is going to happen, but of course what is missing is the link to a hotfix that makes it work properly, aaarrrggghhhh.  Of course it is fixed in SAS 9.2 / WRS 4.2 I believe.

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