Chris posted earlier this month about the documentation that is available on the SAS Support site (http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/customtasks/) which outlines how to create addin’s for Enterprise Guide.
We showcased our first Enterprise Guide addin at the SUNZ conference last week, it allows users to kill their own SAS exe’s that have gone rogue on the SAS Server.
Ill post more on that baby later this week……
Well got my paper in on time for my preso, excitedly titled:
“Paper 313-2011 – Migrating SAS® Enterprise Guide® Projects from SAS® 9.1 to SAS® 9.2″
And the presentaton itsself is almost finished.
Yah me!
Well if anybody else can answer this then give Chris a race for his money 
Based on my previous post it got me thinking about hoe EG retrieved the data.
It looked to me like EG retrieved the preview data into the EG project for the table selected, but failed to run the SAS query on the workspace server.
So from that I deduce that EG wasn’t using the workspace server to retrive the preview data.
Wonder if thats true or not?
Chris?
SAS are doing a Grid install on Linux at a customer site, interesting process to watch I must say.
One of issues they struck was when they tried to get Enterprise Guide 4.3 to run some code on the 9.2 Workspace server (pre Grid component install).
EG could see the metadata and data, it could bring both back to the project, but when you submitted some sas code (say via query Wizard, or list data) an error came up saying EG 4.3 needed SAS 9.2 and the server was the wrong version.
The fix was to reinstall the Intech Client on the PC and it all worked fine.
In the old days installing a client tool individually was easy, but in 9.2 you are encouraged to use the query wizard. As I wanted to only reinstall the IT Client I wanted to do it manually.
The It Client setup files were here:
$INSTALL DEPOT$\products\itclient__92230__win__xx__sp0__1
So if you need to install something manually (i.e EG) its in $INSTALL DEPOT$\products\
We have SAS in at a client site doing a SAS 9.2 Grid install at the moment.
While having a chat they mentioned that there is a new hotfix management tool available for SAS 9.2, and sure enough there is details on the SAS Support site here (thanks Ron!)
What the support says about it is:
“SAS92HFADD creates a customized hot fix report listing hot fixes available for any SAS 9.2 deployment and generates scripts that will automate the download and installation of hot fixes.”
More information and instructions for using the tool are available in the SAS92HFADD Usage Guide and on the SAS92HFADD download page.
But as it was explained to me what the process isis:
1) Run a tool that exports a txt file with your current SAS products, hotfix levels etc
2) Run the analysis tool that looks at your current install txt file and the latests hotfixes and works out the delta’s
3) Creates a txt file of the missing hotfixes
4) You use this txt file and it automatically downloads the hotfixes you can exclude the ones you don’t want downloaded)
5) Run the update script that applies the hotfixes.
The cool thing (well one of them) is if your SAS server can’t access the internet you can still use the txt file to run the compare and hotfix download from your PC!
So it looks like hotfixing is getting easier, about time!
If you have ever wanted to pull a quick document out showing what is contained in a Information Map, then this post by Chris from last year will show you how.
It refers to the following tech support note Sample 39539: Creating a PDF that documents the contents of a SAS® Information Map.
Chris’s post also includes a link to some additional code he wrote that provides even more details of the infomap.
Not sure if Chris’s example will work in 9.1, as it uses the new SAS 9.2 Infomap libname engine.
But the original tech support code should work in SAS 9.1 as it uses the sasiome engine (slightly undocumented feature of SAS 9.1).
One of the talented guys that worked on a project with us a while ago wrote the equivalent capability to extract the information maps developed for the customer into static html pages (which we embedded in the client wiki) so that we could surface the infomation maps contents to the users. He apparently had to work around with some issues with XML tags and escape characters from memory, so im guessing he was parsing the XML.
As an aside a few years ago we developed a Metadata Web Service that dynamically queried the SAS metadata server and displayed the metadata as a webpage.
The goal was to dynamically display the metadata content for libnames, tables, users, etc without having to export it manually.
After a bit of effort we even were able to acces the Infomap content (Infomaps are no stored as standard metadata object on SAS 9.1)
The issue we struck was the client was running 32 bit windows and the Metadata repository was very large, so if we accessed the metadata via the web service it would run out of memory and crash (of course it worked on our small dev and test metadata instances!).
Havent retested now we have SAS 9.2 and can use 64 bit windows, so might have to resurrect it for a retest.
Different JDBC drivers requires different connection URL formats. A quick summary of various connection URL formats is provided here as a comparison and a reference:
jdbc:derby://host/database
jdbc:derby://localhost/TestDB
jdbc:odbc:DSN
jdbc:odbc:MY_FLAT
jdbc:odbc:MY_ACCESS
jdbc:odbc:SQL_SERVER;user=sa;password=myPws
jdbc:mysql://…
jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDB?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql://:3306/myDB?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql://localhost/myDB?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql://localhost/?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql://:3306/?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql:///HerongDB?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:mysql:///?user=myUser&password=myPwd
jdbc:oracle:thin::SID
jdbc:oracle:thin:/SID
jdbc:oracle:thin:myUser/myPwd@localhost:1521:mySID
jdbc:oracle:thin:myUser/myPwd@:1521:mySID
jdbc:oracle:thin:myUser/myPwd@//localhost:1521/mySid
jdbc:oracle:thin:myUser/myPwd@//:1521/mySID
jdbc:oracle:thin:myUser/myPwd@//localhost/mySID
jdbc:oracle:thin:myUser/myPwd@///mySID
jdbc:sqlserver://host
jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;user=sa;password=mypwd
jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1269;user=sa;password=mypwd
jdbc:sqlserver://localhost;user=sa;password=mypwd;database=myDB
When installing the Office Addin in for SAS 9.2 you get the old Excel/Word & Powerpoint options by default.
But the Outlook option is unticked by default, so if you want to use it, tick it!
(and yes you can imagine I keep forgetting hence my post!)
The ooutlook option turned up in the latest M3/4.3 release.
Of course that brings me to my theory that the Office Addin for Outlook component will actually overtake the SAS Portal and AMO/Excel interface as the preferred way of accessing predefined SAS content by end users.
And I could talk about how I think that by also offering Search (Google or Microsoft not the SAS portals … effort) and GIS as the visualisation interfaces to SAS content, that the concept of a Portal is effectively dead. But Ill blog about that later.
Got an unsolicited email from Serus Software Zolutions who are it seems a WPS reseller in Australia.
As you maybe aware WPS provide a set of software that is positioned as being able to natively run SAS code, for a fraction of the license/renewal fees SAS charge.
As you can imagine SAS haven’t been happy about this offering and have engaged in a legal challenge which depending who you believe they lost or won, SAS view here, WPS view here.
From my point of view I can see the market WPS are trying to target and good on them for seeing an opportunity and trying to exploit it.
But what I would say to a customer who asks my opinion would be consider:
- You either get an adequate return on investment (ROI) from the SAS Software or you dont, if you don’t, don’t buy it, why would you?
- If your ROI diminishes over time, stop paying the renewals and stop using the SAS software
- If you purchase WPS you will no longer get SAS support or upgrades, which is what your SAS renewals pay for.
But as I said I can see the value proposition they are offering. (yip im sitting on the fence, hedging my bets, placing a bet each way
As an aside the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI 2011 states that SAS is seen as one of the highest cost BI platforms and has this to say about the cost of SAS:
“So far, most users deem the opportunity cost of creating custom code for similar functionality or sourcing from elsewhere as a nonstarter — only 5% report they are planning or considering discontinuing their use of the product. As competition intensifies, SAS needs to continue providing value to justify customer costs.”
The real interesting thing to me though was the email from Serus Software Zolutions was sent to an email account I have at a customers site, rather than my normal email account. My customer related email address is not generally publicly known and isn’t displayed when searched in google.
As far as I know I have not provided Serus Software Zolutions with permission to contact me at this email address.
It also seems that I wasn’t the only one at the customer site (or other SAS customer sites it seems) that received the solicitation email.
So on a personal note would I engage with a company that doesn’t even subscribe to the basics of permission based maketing, thats a nope!
And i’m still wondering where they acquired the list of email addresses from …….
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