General

Mark was one of our star DI developers over at OptimalBI.com where we took his legendary Oracle data warehousing and ETL skills and showed him how to do it better and faster with SAS DI.

Hey even managed to pick up and deliver some data quality projects using Data Flux. (picked up as in he was dropped in the deep-end and managed to upskil himself and deliver in a very short time, with great results)

Mark decided he was sick of cold, bubbly & tasty beer and decided to try the warm flat stuff and so took himself off to blighty (the UK for the Americans , where he landed a job with SAS UK, which is great news for both sides.

Just wanted to request that SAS UK remember that when Mark is sick of warm beer, grey skys and cold weather (not to mention not being in the country that holds the Rugby World Cup) we would like him back please

(in fact I have had little time to blog lately as you may have noticed, how about SAS UK letting him post a guest blog once a week on the SaasInct blog site)

Interesting post on the SAS Blog site titled  “The vision for SAS Platform as a Service”.

One thing that took my interest was this comment:

“You are an independent SAS consultant with a growing client list in the field of fraud detection for government programs. You’ve created an add-on reporting component for the SAS Fraud Solution that several counties in your area want to deploy to better understand welfare fraud rings in their area.  You want to make it easy for each county to find and download the add-on and for other potential clients to find it within a database or “online store” that features similar SAS apps.”

I would so love a SAS apps store, both for us to be able to promote our portlets and add-ins but also to encourage others to develop and sell extensions to the SAS capability, that people often need.

There are a few third parties developing additional capability for SAS environments, including:

• Futrix
• Metacoda

So a quick survey.

If your site is running SAS Grid on either SAS 9.1 or 9.2……

What Clustered File System, Operating System and SAN/NAS device are you running?

Post a comment of the details against this blog post (and let me know if you don’t want the comment published)

Every (valid) reply will get a full use, no hidden costs, free SaasInct Text Portlet (check this puppy out here)

Ps. If you want to provide extra details like number of Grid servers, etc feel free.  Wonder who had the biggest cluster

One of the most experienced SAS installer/architects I know has finally decided to add his wisdom to the blog space!

Michael Dixon from Scorpio has decided to pen his experiences dealing with implementing SAS software in a myriad of customer environments over at :

http://scorpiosoftware.blogspot.com/

Check it out when you get a chance!

(ps. ignore any posts around October as he will no doubt be blogging through tears as Australia loses the Rugby world cup to New Zealand in the final

I have been doing some work with a customer who is implementing Business Objects Data Federator as the preferred mechanism for all tools to access their corporate data.

This includes accessing data in their corporate applications as well as the Data Warehouse.

They have a SAS Analytics environment and would like SAS to comply with this standard by accessing data in SAS via the Data Federator rather than accessing the data sources directly.

The trick (isnt there always a trick!) is that the BO Data Federator can only be accessed via a JDBC connection.

Of course I thought no problem, SAS can access any data source in the world, can’t it?  Well no  JDBC seems to be one of the few data sources SAS can not access natively as there is no SAS/Access to JDBC.

We have been testing third party JDBC > ODBC bridges and struck the old SAS/Access for ODBC 64 bit can’t access a 32 bit ODBC driver issue.  And of course the JDBC > ODBC bridge we were testing only had a 32 bit provider.  We have found a different provider with a 64 bit version we are testing now.

Anyway I sat in a session at Vegas presented by the SAS/Access product manager so I asked him if a SAS/Access to JDBC was in the pipeline.

He said they had received a few requests over the years, but not enough to put it on the priority list.

So if you need a SAS/Access to JDBC engine (like my customer does) then log a tech support track now asking for one, and when can help each other help ourselves.