Blogging about all things SAS

We are still getting the infamous “Parser has reached the entity expansion limit “64,000″ set by the application” when opening large Information Maps.

As per this tech support note:

Problem Note 20991: SAS® Information Maps with more than 999 data items might fail to open with the SAS Information Map Libname Engine (IMLE)
http://support.sas.com/kb/20/991.html

We have applied the hotfix and checked the config and it all applied as per the tech support note, but we still have the issue intermittently.

What we cant work out is we get this scenario:

• User A opens EG on PC and gets error on info map
• User B uses User A’s open EG client, reconnects to metadata as themselves and it info map opens ok.

• User B opens EG on their PC and info map opens ok
• User A uses User B’s open EG client, reconnects to metadata as themselves and it info map opens ok.

So we deduce that

• it is not the info map because some people can open it
• it sis not the server because some people can open it
• its not users A EG client, because it works for user B
• its not User A’s metadata security because it works on user B’s PC

So only think I can think of is cached files on the EG side, or memory issues on the server?

But as I said it is intermittent across environments, across users.  The only thing we do know is that it only happens on our very large Information Maps.

Any ideas?

We are doing some work to enable Channels and WRS report scheduling in our SAS 9.1.3 environment.

Its a complete mare!

One of the issues we have struck is the inability to delete any packages you have published to a channel.  They just stay there forever.

In SAS 9.2 you get a utility that lets you delete these packages:

SAS 9.2 Using the Package Clean-Up Utility to Remove Packages

Luckily the friendly chaps at SAS tech Support mentioned that there is a SAS Toolpool entry for 9.1.3 that does teh same function.

So if you need to delete Archived Packages in SAS 9.1.3 channels, then as your friendly SAS dude for the toolpool entry.

I am doing some work around using SAS OLAP Server in ROLAP mode in SAS 9.1.3 at the moment.

We have all our Warehouse reporting data stored in Star Schema’s in an Oracle Database.

We have found that the users are accessing the Information Maps we have created via SAS AMO, which is a good thing.

But the bad thing is that when a user outs that data into a pivot table, Excel/AMO downloads the data and stores it in Excel to populate the pivot table ans they are ending up with some massive Excel file sizes.

The answer is to build some OLAP Cubes and use these as the source for the pivot table.  But of course then we strike the issues with OLAP in SAS 9.1.3 such as no incremental updates, OLAP locking etc.

So we are trialing SAS OLAP Cubes in ROLAP mode whihc means the data is retained in Oracle and only the cube structure is built in SAS, which bypasses all these issues.

But of course it is not as easy as it seems.  We run a distributed SAS Windows environment so I need the OLAP server to be able to see the oracle instance etc.

In testing I found it a pain to have to login to Excel/AMO and/or EG to test the OLAP Cube.  Also if there are any errors not a lot of detail is provide.

So instead I just use this code:

proc sql;
connect to olap (host=<host> port=5451 user=<user> pass=,pwd>);
select * from connection to olap (
SELECT
{ [Measures].[COUNTSUM] } ON COLUMNS  ,
{ [region].[region].DefaultMember.Level.Members } ON ROWS
FROM
[,olap_cube_name.]
);
disconnect from olap;
quit;

Check the logs and see any errors.

So here in sunny New Zealand a lot of customers are migrating to SAS 9.2 this year, but some won’t make it till next year (or beyond).

One customer I work with is in the next year camp.  We have just started the rollout of EG across the business and one of the things we encourage/mandate is that before a user gets access to EG they must have attended the SAS EG course. (EG is just so damn powerful/dangerous in a untrained users hands!)

But just been told SAS now only run courses using SAS 9.2 software.  So a dilemma or is it?

If we send our users on the EG 4.2 course I am concerned they will see all the things EG 4.1 doesn’t do and will focus on that, not the things EG 4.1 does very well (compared to other tools, SAS and non SAS)

But then again we need them trained.

EG 4.2 is a little different to EG 4.1 in navigation, functionality etc, but probably not enough that the user will get lost using 4.1 after being trained in 4.2.

(and I can understand SAS need to move training/courses to the latest version etc)

We have the SAS eLearning available to users (funnily enough still only SAS 9.1 based, wonder when that will change to 9.2?), so maybe self learning is enough?

Interested in your views, what are you doing for SAS 9.1 training?

Of course the customer is also currently recruiting BAU DI resource, so DI studio training will be a much bigger issue as DO Studio 3.4 compared to DI Studio 4.2 is a much bigger change.

Lastly if you know of any companies that sell SAS 9.1 training material (these have to have been developed independently of the SAS Education course notes of course and we will check!) that we could use to deliver internal training, let me know.

Its been a full on week what with the SAS 9.2 migration and a whole lot of other work happening on another project.

Also this week I seem to have been shown a lot of tips and tricks I didn’t know you could do.

One of them was found by Rob and passed on to me (thanks Rob).

The issue was in SAS 9.1.3 Management Console and related to some of the screens not having all the relevant fields displayed.  As an example the Libname edit screen might be missing the field where you normally define the file path.

The fix was to go into the Metadata Manager > Resource Templates tree in SMC and delete the relevant template.

Then logout of SMC and log back in and SAS will automagically re-create a new template, and it will be valid.

I needed to install the SAS 9.1.3 Clients into a new Citrix server (yes it is unsupported in 9.1.3 but has worked well for the last 4 years, just don’t ask SAS Tech Support for help of course).

After the installs were all complete and we started migrating users from our old Citrix server, they started complaining of issues with DI Studio.  These included:

- Nodes missing in the Inventory tree

- Options missing in the custom transform / custom code nodes

Adding the following option to the DI Studio ini file fixed both issues:

-DentityExpansionLimit=1000000

No idea why it fixed it and only reference on support.sas.com is a similar setting for Information Map studio here to fix it not being able to open more than 999 objects.

But as always fix it first, question it later.

If you want to use a Information Map as a data source for tasks such as DI Studio Jobs, Stored Processes, or building OLAP cubes, you can create a SAS Library that points to a folder that contains the Information Maps.

Each Information Map then gets treated as a table in the library.

To do this either use the following SAS code:

libname ImapLib sasioime
user=”username”
pw=”password”
metaserver=”servername”
metaport=8561
metarepository=”Foundation”
mappath=”/BIP Tree/InfoMaps/sales”

Of course you need to add your on environment settings for the variables.

Or you can create it in metadata by creating a libname with:

• Create a generic libname
• Type =  sasioime
• Options = user=”username” pw=”password” metaserver=”servername” metaport=8561 metarepository=”Foundation” mappath=”/BIP Tree/InfoMaps/sales”

Issues to be aware of:

• It is slow as you are going through multiple layers to get to the data (i.e Libname > Infomap > Query and Reporting Services > Libname > Data)
• The user is hard coded for the libname
• If the libname has fields defined with gaps in the names the SAS Libname will not show the column.

I have been doing an install of SAS 9.1.3 clients on a a Citrix server (yes I know it is not supported) and all worked fine with Enterprise Guide etc but all the Java clients wouldn’t run.

Everytime they started up they couldn’t find some path and just gave an error saying path could not be found.

We troubled shooted it to the fact that we had changed the Citrix server layout from the last server and had used different drive mappings.  As part of this we had moved where the SAS Client Metadata Profile settings (.swa files) were stored.

So when SAS Data Integration Studio, Management Console etc started they looked for the .swa files in the location defined on the previous Citrix server (as the Citirix profile travels with the user across servers).

The fix was to edit the app.smc file in the users directory (for us C:\Documents and Settings\~user).  In that file is a line:

WorkspacePath=C:\\Documents and Settings\\~user\\Workspaces

Which defines where the Metadata profile files (.swa) are stored.

the other options (thanks SAS tech Support) is to put the following option on the clients .ini file (i.e C:\Program Files\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.1\sasmc.ini):

-Duser.home=C:\SAS

This will then make all users access the .swa files under a workspace dir under this path.  But of course they all access the same ones, so lock them down so they can’t be changed.

Trick for young players on that one, make sure it is after the “-Dsas.app.class.dirs=” option as if you add it at the end it gets ignored for some reason.

And of course do it for each of the SAS clients.

One of the

I have heard from a few SAS customers who have been using some of the SAS Toolpool entries in SAS 9.1 that they no longer work with SAS 9.2.

And as of course they are toolpool entries they are not officially supported by SAS so there may not be an immediate upgrade path to SAS 9.2.

But of course some of them are still providing additional functionality that is not available in SAS 9.2.

So I have been thinking of ways to keep the development team busy over Xmas, and recreating some of these might be the ticket.

So if you have one that you need, let us know what it does, and you will never know what Santa and his elves may deliver

Please don’t send us a copy (we write all our sasInct Portlets from scratch) but feel free to post here what it does, or create a support track at http://support.sasinct.com/login

And lastly we will post any that we develop on our website for the usual one off USD $1,000,  unlimited users/no expiration, (these elves are not cheap) and of course if it is a biggy (aka Metadata Explorer etc) then we probably wont.

Setting up SAS Share to enable you to Import and Export ABM models is one of those things that always seems to be a bit tricky to get working.

I found a public doc on the old ABC Tech support site here, that explains the steps. I have also cut and paste the content below in case the doc disappears.

One thing to note is that if you have two SAS servers wanting to talk via this SAS Share link (i.e one with SAS ABM and the other with SAS DI or EG etc) you need to make sure the SAS Share names are identical on both servers or it wont work!

Oh and don’t forget that you need SAS Share OLEDB client on every PC that wants to export/import. You can install this from the SAS ABM Client install page on your ABM Webserver.

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