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Installing SAS 9.2 AMO for Outlook (4.3) – Tick the box stupid!

Installing SAS 9.2 AMO for Outlook (4.3) – Tick the box stupid!
Feb
04
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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.

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SAS 9.2 – Accessing even more data it seems

SAS 9.2 – Accessing even more data it seems
Feb
03
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Ive being doing some work around Libnames and SAS Libraries in SAS 9.2, and thought mmm there looks like more in the list.

Is it me or has SAS added a lot more Libraries options in SAS 9.2?

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Is your Portal Content playing peek-a-boo in 9.2

Jan
19

Saw this interesting SAS Support note “Problem Note 36697: Group member cannot see shared group content in SAS® Information Delivery Portal“ referenced in a discussion on the SAS Support Discussion forums.

It seems a change has been made to make the SAS Portal pages load faster in SAS 9.2 (good!)

But the trick for your players is that the users Portal group membership is cached.

What this means is if you change the users groups, for example add them to a new group so they have access to additional content, the cache needs to be refreshed or they will never see the content.

The support note outlines a couple of options for refreshing the cache.

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SAS Enterprise Miner, Delivers the goods but needs makeup (or makeover)

Jan
19

I was reading this interesting blog here from Jiangtang Hu, where he compares SAS Enterprise Miner with IBM’s Intelligent Miner and SPSS Clementine (interesting he didn’t compare Oracle’s Data Mining offering)

His outcome was SAS EM wins on most areas except the User Interface.

I must say that after doing an upgrade for a client to SAS 9.2 M3 and SAS Enterprise Miner 6.2 the other day, I logged straight into Enterprise Miner to see if it still looked as ugly as it always has, and the answer is yes.

Now I know look and feel doesn’t actually make that much of a difference to actual usability (just sales ;-) , and that SAS Enterprise Miner normally has a very limited set of users in an organisation (compared to Web Report Studio which looks damn sexy in 4.3).

But you would think that at some stage in the many upgrades and updates since SAS Enterprise Miner 4.1 the development team would have at least adopted the nice look and feel of DI Studio or the other good looking Studio interfaces.

SAS Enterprise Miner is starting to look very 80′s (especially those top buttons!) and not in a cool retro Miami Vice sort of way either!

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Uninstalling SAS 9.2 on Windows – Be Gone Damn Spot!

Jan
11

If you have the pleasure of installing SAS on a Windows server and then trying to uninstall and reinstall it multiple times, you will know that the uninstall process is time consuming and painful.

You have to go through the standard windows add/remove programs process for each SAS component/product, or restore a clean copy of the server image in the pre-install state.

(Now why would you do this multiple times you ask, well often becuase you have mucked up the install or you are trying to install a version of SAS that matches your client to test something for them or you)

SAS have issued a tech note that makes life so much easier:

Installation Note 39894: Using the SAS Uninstall Wizard to remove SAS® 9.2 from Microsoft Windows operating environments

The wizard assumes a raft of defaults that you will probably need to overide (i.e c:\) but provides parameter options to let you do this.

And of course if you are on Linux/Unix then there is no Windows registry to get in the way, so ignore the tool and just delete the files!

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New Sysinternals Process Explorer

Jan
09

Im a great fan of the System Internals process explorer as a great way of getting a better handle on what is happening on a windows server, compared to the standard task manager.

Looks like they released a new version in Nov 2010 which you can downlaod from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

There is also a suite of other utilities (including process explorer) called the Sysinternals Suite which can be downloaded from here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062

Its not often you can get something that is free and useful, but this is one of those occasions.

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Migrating from SAS BI Dashboards 4.2 to 4.3

Nov
30

There is a SAS note that will be very helpfull in understandong the differences between SAS BI Dashboards 4.2 and 4.3.

It also has links to other usage notes outlining some issues you might encounter.

Check out:  Usage Note 40474: SAS® BI Dashboard 4.3 is completely new software

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Web OLAP Viewer is dead (RIP)

Nov
28

I remember when SAS 9.1 was released and the new SAS Web OLAP viewer for Java (SWOVJ) was released.

It was a great new interface to replace the old MRV.

It went through a few iterations, but not a lot changed (although I was always confused about which version could only open Cubes and whihc could open Cubes and Relational adata).

And then there was the SAS Web OLAP Viewer for .Net (SWOVN), always tricky in demo’s trying to decide which one to demo. showing both would always confuse people, especially as the both had different functionality.  (By the way the answer ended up being demo the Java one, unless the customers were a Microsoft bigets)

The goal of SAS development was always to roll the OLAP Viewer functionality into Web Report Studio, and after just completing a SAS BI 4.3 client upgrade it looks like it has happened.

In the upgrade notes it says:

“The product has been upgraded from Version 4.2 to Version 4.3.
The SAS Web OLAP Viewer application is no longer supported. It has been replaced by functionality that is available in SAS Web Report Studio 4.3.”

So SAS Web OLAP Viewer me old friend, thanks for all your help, and RIP.

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Wahoo – Elvis has entered the building (and he brought the SAS 4.3 BI Clients with him)

Nov
16

Thanks to Chris for posting a comment to let me know that the SAS 9.2 –  4.3 BI Clients have been released and the doco is out as well:

http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/whatsdiff/63928/HTML/default/viewer.htm#pdtnewspecifics.htm

There goes my weekend ;-)

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Finally got my feet wet by jumping in a puddle

Oct
07

Finally got a chance to setup workspace pooling in SAS 9.1 and WRS 3.1.

Followed the instructions I outlined in this post

http://blog.saasinct.com/2010/09/28/speeding-up-web-report-studio-9-13-1-by-jumping-in-puddles/

Was simple enough to setup and get working, only trick was to remember to stop and restart the webserver so WRS/WRV could pick up the changes and switch over from load balanced to pooled.

Other issue was deciding what the minimum number of connections for a puddle to define.  Checked the help, and there was some, but not a lot of insight was gained after reading it.

“Minimum Available Servers

specifies the minimum number of servers that should be idle and available in the pool at any time. The number of running servers never exceeds the Maximum Clients value specified on the server. If the number of available servers falls below the value specified in this field, additional server connections are created.
Minimum Number of Servers
specifies the minimum number of servers (both idle and active) that should be present in the pool at any time. This value also specifies how many servers should be started when the pool is first created.

Minimum Available Serversspecifies the minimum number of servers that should be idle and available in the pool at any time. The number of running servers never exceeds the Maximum Clients value specified on the server. If the number of available servers falls below the value specified in this field, additional server connections are created.Minimum Number of Serversspecifies the minimum number of servers (both idle and active) that should be present in the pool at any time. This value also specifies how many servers should be started when the pool is first created.”

Clear as mud eh!

But the key seems to be if you dont have enough pooled sessions available the users waits for one to become free.  So you would create lots then wouldn’t you.  Ah but each one is taking up memory as it sits there waiting for a request, so you dont want to many.

Haven’t found any form of management or monitoring tool that keeps track of how many sessions you have available and  how many requests over time, and of course any mismatch.  Im guessing we are going to have to go log mining yet again.

Some other good sources of info on Pools, Puddles, Sessions and Gumboots can be found here:

Overview of Pooling

Planning the Pooling Security (IOM Bridge only)

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