Archive for March, 2011

SAS Forum 2011 – What will they announce?

Mar
26

Well apart from SAS 9.3 (ill post more on that later) I am guessing SAS will be publicly announcing their new BI capability due out at the end of this year.

There has been a rumor round for a while that SAS HO wasn’t happy with the latest Gartner BI Magic Quadrant.

So a decision was made to put some immediate focus on improving the BI reporting capability and to improve its market share and positioning.

Cindi Howson has posted on her blog some details making them public http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2011/03/sas-wants-to-be-the-best-in-bi-really.html

Some highlights from her post:

“Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO and founder of SAS, says, “I want my BI to be better than anyone else’s.””

“Looking ahead, SAS plans to release a new version of its BI suite in fall 2011.”

“The company has reorganized over 300 developers to dramatically improve the user interface, a move that affects not only the BI suite, but also the presentation layer of its industry analytic applications (SAS Solutions).”

So im glad there is some focus on the BI layer to make sure SAS doesn’t lose its ability to compete against the Oracle, IBM and Microsoft “stack plays” or the up and coming BI vendors like QlikTech.

But I do wonder if it is wise to (and in fact whether they will) focus on look and feel and no doubt add a whole raft of new wizzy widgets and functions.

When SAS 9.1 was released I believe SAS got a jump on the BI market by being the first large vendor to release the first integrated BI Suite that used a single Metadata repository.  But with the 5 year gap between 9.1 and 9.2 they lost a lot of that lead.  They obviously feel they need to now play catchup, but in my experience with SAS and other BI tools they aren’t that different (yes there are always things other vendors do better).

So where would I put my money if it was me, well I would create a metadata access layer that allowed SAS to read the other BI vendors semantic layers (i.e Oracle BMM, BO Universes etc).  Open up those vendors semantic layer as a data source for SAS (and its BI layer) would be a game changer.

Of course im guessing they won’t so maybe that should be the next SaasInct project?

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SAS Forum Papers online – all the way back to 1976!

Mar
18

Just noticed over on sascommunity,org (http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/SAS_Global_Forum_Proceedings) that they have posted scanned copies of all the papers from SAS Forum (SUGI) all the way back to 1976!

Wonder how many people who presented in 1976 are presenting at SAS Forum 2011 in Vegas?

If you are let me know.

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Updating SAS PC Files Server Port

Mar
16

When installing the SAS PC File server it defaults to using port 8621.

But if you have the SAS Stored Process server installed in SAS 9.2 it also uses port 8621.

So when trying to start the SAS PC File server as a Windows services it won’t start.

To change the port, open the SAS PC File server via the Desktop Start menu Shortcut.

Was about to type this up in full but found a SAS Support note instead ;-)

Usage Note 36974: Changing the default port that the SAS® 9.2 PC Files Server uses when it is installed as a service

 

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Allowing user to publish content that everyone can automatically see in the portal

Mar
15

Doing some research on the new SAS Addin for Microsoft Outlook 4.3, to trouble shout an issue at a customer site (more on that later) when I came across this post on the SAS Support site.

Sample 36921: Using the SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office to publish documents that can be accessed from the SAS® Information Delivery Portal

It describes a way to change the default content storage options so that when a user saves a document vis the SAS Addin for Microsoft Office, the conent is automatically available via the SAS portal.

I am a great fan of creating content once and making it easily available to as many users as is useful, via their preferred channel. This is a great technique to help with that approach.

 

 

 

 

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Enterprise Guide 4.3, Making it work with SAS Internal Userid’s

Mar
10

Had an interesting experience with the new SAS 9.2 environment at a customer site.

We have got SAS 9.2 (actually SAS Grid but thats irrelevant for this post) installed on RedHat 5 Linux.  As we are using Linux and not Windows we lose the standard integration with Active Directory.  We didn’t want to implement PAM integration with AD (mainly because nobody can articulate clearly all the steps required to get it working).

So we were left with Host authentication. As we only had a few users in this phase thats not so bad, but as we have a few servers (i.e Grid) I really wanted a easy way to avoid creating userid’s on each server.

Aha I thought Ill use internal SAS user id’s and then get the user to inherit a trusted/host user id to run the SAS processes.

So I setup the user in Metadata with an internal id, made sure they didn’t have a standard user identity (i.e username/pwd against DefaultAuth).  Also assigned the user to be a member of SAS General Servers (to inherit sassrv, planned to change this when it worked) and for extra fun added a OraAuth with a username/pwd for the Oracle DB and assigned the user as a member of that as well.

So into DI Studio and Information Map Studio as the user using the internal userid/pwd and:

  • Connect to metadata – tick
  • Access SAS app – tick
  • Access and SAS Table – tick
  • Run a query – tick
  • Access the Oracle table – tick
  • Run a query – tick

Now connect using EG 4.3 with same internal userid/pwd and:

  • Access metadata – tick
  • Access SAS App – nope

mmmmm talk to helpful onsite SAS installer, he could get it to work by adding DefaultAuth in the EG connection in the Auth Domain field.  Ok try that and yip all good.  So carry on testing.

  • Access SAS App – tick
  • Access SAS Table – tick
  • Run query – tick
  • Access Oracle Table – nope

mmmmm get a could not access Auth Domain.

So into some more tesing, worked out you can type what ever you ant in the Auth Domain connection to get this behaviour (i.e x would do the same as DefaultAuth).

As you do we tried all the combinations we could think of, and no cigar.  So helpful SAS installer logged tech suport track and just go this back.:

How to Configure SAS Token Authentication

Followed the distructions and wahoo we have lift off.

So it looks like you can’t use the standard Username/Password authentication method if you want to use internal userid’s/passwords and EG 4.3.

But SAS Token Authentication does work.

Now to test all the other options to see if this change effects anything else, oh the joy of testing …..

 

 

 

 

 

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New EG 4.3 Hotfix – 5 March 2011

Mar
07

Just noticed Chris has posted an entry outlining a new hotfix for Enterprise Guide 4.3.

Details are here: http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/HF2/C44.html#C44006

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Hard disks are cheap, hosted disk space isn’t – why ?

Mar
06

Because nobody has decided to disrupt the market and make oodles of disk space available at little or no cost.

I can now purchase a 1tb external hard drive for about NZD $99.  This is for the disk and the external drive inclosure.

I can get a dropbox account with 2GB of disk storage free.  But its USD $20 a month for 100GB, so $2,400 a year for 1TB

I can buy Rackspace files at USD $150 a month for 1TB (@ 15 cents a GB), so USD $1,800 a year.

Mozy.com will cost me USD $5.99 a month for 50GB or USD 9.99 for 125GB, again USD 1,000 ish for 1TB

Or even worse I can get a web hosting account with 5GB for NZD $60 a month  (ok it is in NZ!).

NZ backup specific sites will do 10GB for NZD $90 a month, a whopping NZD $108,000 a year!

So yes I know there needs to be fail over (ok so NZD $200 for two 1tb disks) and people and additional hardware and traffic and redundancy, and redundancy and a bit more redundancy (its like the fact we have to say backup 3 times in a row before making changes ;-) .

But you still have to say there is an opportunity for somebody to make the hosting of raw data more of a commodity. (or at least host a dropbox server in NZ so I dont get whacked with international traffic charges for uploading and downloading files!)

I did think about why google doesnt offer free storage (aka extend their gmail concept) perhaps its because its harder to show ads to generate revenue as you put the files there and don;t really touch them again unless needed.  And also not so much valuable information to mine like there is in emails and website logs.

So what has this got to do with SAS, not a lot.

BUt if you think about it, lots of people always go on about how expensive SAS is.  But if there were cheaper alternatives, wouldn’t people buy them and SAS go under (or at least stop the constant year on year growth?)

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How to add the Outlook addin 4.3 after the fact – thanks Angela!

Mar
04

I while ago I posted about remembering to tick the box for outlook integration when installing AMO 4.3.

Barry commented that you dont see that tick box option when you do an upgrade from a previous version of AMO.

Angela has just posted a way of adding it after the fact over here  Super Important Tip on Upgrading from 4.2 to 4.2 Add-in to MS Office

(mental note to self, given this hidden executable and the EG migration wizard, really need to spend sometime one day clicking on all the .exe’s and see what else is hidden!)

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SUNZ 2011 – a great conference

Mar
03

Well the New Zealand SAS User group (SUNZ) is over for another year, with over 250 people attending last Thursday.

The presentations will be up soonish, but mine is up early here “Delivering Data Quality in the Real Word – A case study using SAS Dataflux”

The main theme I got from the conference was the move in topics from accessing and managing data in previous years to the concept of Business Analytics, which is obviously a theme that is being replicated world wide.

One of scariest presentations was from Sue at New Zealand post about their Genius system (they have actually made sas.com fame! @ New Zealand Post works with SAS® to create Genius™).  Its scary because they can derive so much insight about a person and their expected behaviour from all the information they have access to (and of course the power of SAS).

Just lucky they don’t have access to internal Google, Facebook or Twitter data I suppose!

Ill let you know when all the preso’s are up on slideshare.

 

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Installing Enterprise Miner 6.2 Client – Use the install and config option!

Mar
03

Had a weird one this week.

SAS are installing a Grid environment at a customer site.

We had already installed the SAS 9.2 clients on a dedicated Citrix box, so the dev team could test the new SAS 9.2 clients / functionality.

We wanted to add a few clients, including the Enterprise Miner 6.2 client (we aren;t installing a websever so can’t use the web based java client).

So ran the install wizard, selected add additional software and then selected Enterprise Miner client.  Install wizard went through ok and completed succesfully.

But there was no Enterprise Miner shortcut on the start menu, and if I clicked the em.exe I got nada.

After a bit of tooing and froing, the answer was to run the install wizard, do a planned deployment and only select the client tier and then Enterprise Miner.

Thing that is confusing is that Enterprise Guide, Management Console, DI Studio etc all installed ok via the add additional software option.

Just not Enterprise Miner (and no error messages of course).

I won’t rant about the fact that although a lot of the SAS products/client interfaces all finally share the same infrastructure components, user interfaces and functionality (im loving shared prompts), a number of them are stil orphans in this regard (why oh why doesnt EM use std metadata connection profiles like every other SAS client!)

But if you do find that you manually install Enterprise MIner client and it just doesn’t, try a planned deployment.

 

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