Blogging about all things SAS

**** Update: Much better outline on the process for EG 4.3 over at Chris’s Blog http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/194-SAS-Enterprise-Guide-4.3-is-available.html ***

I do believe SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 has been released with a raft of new features!

A couple of presentations outlining what is new can be found here:

• SAS® Programmer’s Paradise: New Goodies in SAS® Enterprise Guide® 4.3
• Enterprise Guide 4.3 and Other Upcoming SAS Releases

And the official doco is here:

• http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/index.html

Looks like the other 4.3 clients (i.e WRS, Portal, BI Dashboards) are still slated for October 2010 (the year is always as important as the month sometimes , but Chris and team delivered Enterprise Guide 4.3 as promised in August (well done Chris!)

Now it seems that to get hold of EG 4.3 you need to request it from your account manager.

However this SAS Discussion Forum post http://support.sas.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=10452 indicates that some people have got hold of it by updating their software depot.

Reading between the lines I think it looks like the process is to contact your account manager to get a new download order and then update your software depot to get the software.  But as I said im guessing here.

Also it looks like there is some confusion about whether EG 4.3 will run on SAS 9.2 M2 or if SAS 9.2 M3 is a pre-requisite.

What I understand is that EG 4.3 requires SAS 9.2 M3 to be supported, but that it may work with M2.

If anybody has anymore info feel free to update SAS Discussion Forum post.

Oh and lastly reading the doco it seems that you need to migrate your EG projects to 4.3, even if they are currently 4.2.  I wonder if this means that they are then incompatible with EG 4.2 after that (like the migration for EG 4.1 > EG 4.2).  Think I need to contact my partner manager and get the new download order number and test a few things.

Got a curly one from a customer yesterday, so thought I would throw it out to the wider community (and Chris from SAS to see if there is an answer.

So in Web Report Studio you can have the prompts that have been selected (i.e City = Auckland) automatically displayed on a report.

The customer is of course not using WRS but is using Enterprise Guide, Stored Processes and Office Addin.

They worked out a way to have Stored Processes that are delivered via Excel/AMO to display the selected prompts when executed, and we could use this concept in EG to effectively create two list reports (one for report content and one for selected prompts) and combine them in report.

But I was wondering if any knew of a way to have the prompts shown in a graph output etc?

So if you want to make friends again with your users (after peeing them off by making the change in my last blog post) you can make it easier for them to connect to different Metadata environments, without having to change the connection details within Enterprise Guide.

If you run Production / UAT / Development environments you can make it easy for users to start choose which environment they want before starting EG and thus removing the need to go through the conneciton wizard each time to change environments.

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/enclient/61192/HTML/default/a003280786.htm

Creating Desktop Shortcuts for Different Profiles

After you have created profiles, you can associate a profile with a shortcut on the Windows desktop. This capability enables you to start SAS Enterprise Guide with a specific profile by clicking on a specific shortcut. You can also start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile by using a desktop shortcut.

To associate a profile with a desktop shortcut, follow these steps:

1. Create a shortcut for the file SEGuide.exe. By default, it will be in the directory C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2.
2. Right-click on the shortcut that you created and select Properties.
3. To start SAS Enterprise Guide by using a specific profile, add /profile:<profile name> at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /profile. If the profile name includes spaces, you must enclose the name in quotation marks:

   "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /profile:"SAS Metadata"

   To start SAS Enterprise Guide without a profile, add /noprofile at the end of the string in the Target box. You must include a space before /noprofile:

   "C:\Program Files\SAS\EnterpriseGuide\4.2\SEGuide.exe" /noprofile

4. Click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
5. You can now rename and move the shortcut to the desktop.

So after playing with EG 4.2 for a few days in anger I have to say I like it.

Things I like:

• The new folder structure that 9.2 Metadata introduced, works a treat in EG to save projects, files etc
• New layout is good, especially the window with folder view, server view, task view etc in one
• The conditional logic is way cool!
• The status bar that gives you more details on what is running is great
• Function level security means its easier to roll out in a controlled way
• The project auto recover has saved me a few times already
• The prompting framework rocks
• Use of SAS/Access for PC file formats (if licensed) makes things faster
• Query wizard joins now clearly explain inner, left, right and outer joins
• Raft of additions around querying aggregated values, as well as detailed records
• Accessing Information Maps works fully, no more limited functionality
• Task templates rock, you can create all your graphs automatically using your default corporate styles/themes
• The kill button actually works, invaluable!

Things I still can’t get to grips with:

• Double clicking on a node opens the result table , not the query, still haven’t got used to that
  (update from Chris @ SAS “hold the Ctrl key when you double-click on a task/query node and EG will open the task dialog instead of the results.”)
• Tabs are gone and yes pulldown is better use of screen realestate (especially for big projects) but tabs were easy.
• F4 to get back to process flow view is now only works dependent on what you are viewing
• There is now a filter and sort option and a query options, almost got used to it though

Things that suck:

• Dependent prompts don’t work (create a Stored processes and they do though)

The team from SAS NZ did a great preso on whats new in SAS EG 4.2 at SUNZ this year, copy of overview paper here:

http://www.slideshare.net/sunznz/sas-enterprise-guide-whats-new

So after converting a few EG project from SAS 9.1/EG 4.1 to SAS 9.2/EG 4.2 I have found a few interesting experiences.

I have just posted my experience with the EG Migration Wizard

Once the EG project is in 4,2 format a few other things have surfaced:

• When importing MS Access or Excel files in the project, the import function has seemed to fundamentally changed, this caused a number of issues, specifically around importing date fields
• Also it changes the title of the import file node from the database or excel file name to the access table or excel sheet name.  A little frustrating when multiple excel spreadsheets are being imported and they are all based on sheet1!
• The query wizard has changed the way it handles calculations on calculated items, not sure exactly how, but query nodes that worked fine in 4.1 error in 4.2.  However once we recreated these calcs manually it all worked fine.

Little niggles and all can be fixed, but again don’t under estimate the amount of effort to get these things converted.

There is a migration wizard delivered with Enterprise Guide 4,2 (9.2) that enables you to convert your EG projects automatically when you upgrade.

It is a an exe file in your EG 4.2 directory.

This wizard scans the selected EG projects and allows you to do a global replace of Servers, Libraries and External files.

The alternative is to open each EG project and manually change these (or alternatively do a fully automated SAS 9.2 migration, where you dont change any of the server names, libnames or file paths

So I have found this wizard a bit hit and miss.  Don’t get me wrong it still saves you time, but I have found instances where it doesnt actually update the EG Projects (normally when trying to convert a lot of projects at once).

Also with project that have a lot of tabs, it sometimes forgets to do one.

Another issue is it changes the libname of a source table, bit if the query saves the result table in a permanent libname (i.e. not work) then it doesn’t seem to update those ones.

So all fixable and the wizard is better than no wizard, but don’t under estimated the effort required to convert these projects.

Enterprise Guide 4.2 and Office Addin 4.2 now have the ability to access OLAP cubes that are not registered in SAS Metadata.

Effectively this allows you to use the SAS tools to access non SAS cubes (assuming you have the OLEDB connector installed)

These are called Private OLAP Servers.

Following extract  from 051-2009: What’s New in SAS® Add-In 4.2 for Microsoft Office explains it well.

Great Gotham Cities, Batman!

Got a real interesting situation with SAS EG 4.1.

A lot of our DI developers and SAS Analysts use EG like demons.

They all have dual monitors as well, so they can work twice as hard (or keep a track on the latest SAS blogs while working

One issue we are having is that every now and again EG just disappears on them, kapow, no errors, no warnings, no pop ups just gone. And of course it normally happens when they are in the middle of an important project and they havent saved the EG project for ages.

We think we have tracked it down to the use of Dual Monitors but arent completely sure that is it.

Anybody else expereinced this?

Been doing some work on SAS Security lately and the post over on Angela Halls blog about Managing Metadata via EG, elicited my post. Particluary the comment “NOTE:: Deleting Metadata can cause orphan content elsewhere, so use this capability judiciously.”

When you first install SAS it by default optimistic, by that I mean it allows public, and SAS Users to do lots unless you stop them.

Now if you do the SAS Administrators course the first thing you get told is to secure metadata, i.e change it to a pessimistic view, where users can’t do anything unless you grant them (or a group they belong to) rights to do so.

Easier said than done, as you can’t just deny everything to Public and SAS Users as nothing will work (because they need to be able to read and write metadata to check what they can do

So you need to play with your ACT and Group structure to initially deny them everything and then grant access to what you want them to see.

I suggest you at least deny the write metadata on anything you want to keep, before you show them in Enterprise Guide how to delete stuff

I beleive this all changes in SAS 9.2.

So looking for some help from the SAS community.

On a project we have focused on delivering content via Web Report Studio and Infomaps.

We now want to allow users to access the content via Office Addin and Enterprise Guide.

But (there is always a butt we only want users to access data via Information Map, we don’t want them to access the base libnames or tables.

Why you ask, because we have all the business rules embedded in the Information Maps so we don’t want users bypassing these and defining there own business rules on the base data.

Of course if we deny access to the libname then the Infomaps will fail. We can’t restrict access to all data types (i.e tables) in AMO or EG.

So any ideas out there?

Things we are going to try:

• Implement workspace server pooling (grant access to tables trusted user, but not actual use)
• Create a workspace server for WRS reports with full rights inherited and a workspace server for AMO/EG users with linbame rights restricted

But we are pretty sure that neither of these will work.

As the title says, Help!