Blogging about all things SAS

SAS 9.4 – Wahoo!

Shane Gibson — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:19:40 +0000

I have seen my first tech support track response that mentions SAS 9.4.

Wahoo the countdown begins!

SAS 9.4 is also mentioned once on the support.sas.com site:

http://support.sas.com/techsup/pcn/openvms93.html

Want to know what replaced Xythos in SAS 9.2/9.3 – enter the jackrabbit

Shane Gibson — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:25:31 +0000

In SAS 9.1.x the WebDav technology SAS used was powered by an open source component called Xythos.

Xthyos provided the mechanism by which the SAS Web tools (WRS, Portal etc) could read and write to a database repository (Postgres, Oracle, Sql Server etc) to store the content (WRS (XML) reports).

In SAS 9.2 / 9.3, SAS re-engineered the entire platform to remove the Xythos component and deliver what is called the SAS Content Server.

If you look under the cover, you wil find that SAS have replaced Xythos with another open source component to provide the WebDav capability, this time Apache JackRabbit.

When you start up the Web server and checkout the logs and you wil see something along the lines of:

“2011-11-11 12:42:32,836[[STANDBY] ExecuteThread: ’2′ for queue: ‘weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)’] INFO org.apache.jackrabbit.webdav.simple.SimpleWebdavServlet – WWW-Authenticate header = ‘Basic realm=”Jackrabbit Webdav Server”

Adding WRS to Portal in SAS 9.2 / 9.3

Shane Gibson — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:55:13 +0000

Want to add Web Report Studio as a link in the SAS 9.2/9.3 Portal with single sign-on?

Add a Portal application using the following url:

http://:/SASWebReportStudio/logonFromPortal.do

How to create multiple LSF users

Shane Gibson — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:22:58 +0000

By default when you install and configure LSF as part of SAS you get two users created lsfadmin and lsfuser.

Good SAS Admin practice is not use either of these accounts to schedule your production batch runs, but to create a new user for this specific task.

Of course the steps to creating new LSF users is buried in the middle of a raft of user and admin guides so most customers I deal with don;t bother.

Michael from Scorpio (he is Australian and drinking out of saucers at the moment has written a step by step blog that describes what you need to do to achieve this process over here:

Platform Suite for SAS – Dev/Test/Prod Tips

Adding custom content to SASPortal in SAS 9.2 & 9.3

Shane Gibson — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:18:27 +0000

Web Application Custom Content

If you wish to add custom content into SAS web applications, you may do so by placing your custom content into the appropriate custom content directory structure for the given application, and then running the SAS Deployment Manager to rebuild web applications. The custom content root directory for a given web application is

/data/SASCONFIG/Lev1/Web/Common/Server Name/Application Name/CustomContent

For example,

/data/SASCONFIG/Lev1/Web/Common/SASServer1/SASWebReportStudio4.2/CustomContent

Within that directory, there are subdirectories (for example, ears or wars) corresponding to specific archive types (ear and war files, respectively). Under the archive type directories, there are subdirectories for each specific archive—these are the root directories for each archive within the application. Custom content should be placed in the archive’s directory tree corresponding to where the content should appear within the archive.

For example, to add the ear_addon.xml file into the addons directory in the sas.webreportstudio ear file, create the

…/CustomContent/ears/sas.webreportstudio/addons

directory, and place ear_addon.xml in it. Our process knows which war files are contained within ear files, so if you want to add war_addon.jar into the WEB-INF/lib directory in the sas.webreportstudio war file within the sas.webreportstudio ear file, then create

…/CustomContent/wars/sas.webreportstudio/WEB-INF/lib

directory, and place war_addon.jar in it.

Once all your custom content is ready to be consumed, run the SAS Deployment Manager and choose to rebuild web applications. Doing so will rebuild the web applications, inserting the custom content into the archives under the appropriate paths. Note that if custom content has the same path and name of content normally included in the archive, then the custom content takes precedence.

Adding Login back to the SAS 9.2 Portal

Shane Gibson — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:36:40 +0000

If you need to display the login link on the portal after a user has logged out, Angela has posted how to do it here:

Save User Frustration by adding the magic ‘Log (back) In’ button

JMP is bundled with SAS Enterprise Miner in both 9.2 & 9.3

Shane Gibson — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 08:29:43 +0000

I blogged a while ago about some changes to the SAS licensing with SAS adding a few more capabilities at no extra charge (didn’t even need to buy the steak knives

One of the things I mentioned was that JMP is now bundled as part of SAS Enterprise Miner (to match your EM client license).

But I wasn’t sure if it covered SAS 9.2 and 9.3 or just 9.3.

Just had confirmation today from SAS Contracts that its is bundled in both SAS 9.2 and 9.3.

You may need to go and ask for a separate download key as it didn’t come in the standard 9.2 download I just did, but ask away cause its yours!

Big ups to Mr Mark Wastney

Shane Gibson — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:51:12 +0000

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)

SAS and an Apps store – yes please

Shane Gibson — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:34:25 +0000

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:

And some of the leading SAS Consulting companies from around the world also seem to develop bespoke applications.

But again there is no co-ordinated environment to help these innovators flourish, so good news to see SAS are thinking about it, just a pity that it looks like it is still just thinking at the moment.

So quick survey on SAS Grid and Clustered File Systems (free text portlet for every response (thats not spam!))

Shane Gibson — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:25:30 +0000

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