Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2013

By Paul Homes | Published: 7 May 2013

I’m back in Australia now after attending SAS Global Forum 2013 in San Francisco last week. As always it was a fantastic conference where I got to meet lots of other enthusiastic SAS users, see some great papers about SAS software (though I never seem to see as many papers as I originally planned), and spend lots of time in the demo hall. The demo hall is one of my favourite places. You can talk to SAS developers and product managers about what’s coming in the next major release of SAS (9.4). The demo hall is also where Metacoda (my company) had a SAS Alliance Member sponsor stand and got to show our latest Metacoda products. Meeting our customers from the other side of the globe is always a highlight of the conference for me.

These are some of my favourite papers from the conference. As you will see from the list, Read More »

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Promoting SAS Security Metadata (in Custom Repositories)

By Paul Homes | Published: 2 April 2013

Did you know that with SAS® 9.3 you can promote (export/import) SAS metadata packages containing users, groups, roles, and ACTs, just like you can with Jobs, Tables, Libraries, Stored Processes, Reports and Information Maps? I needed to do this myself a few weeks ago. I wanted to promote some groups, roles and ACTs from an existing SAS 9.3 M1 installation to a newer SAS 9.3 M2 installation. Security metadata can be exported and imported via a SAS package file (.spk) from special virtual folders under the top-level /System folder. These virtual folders are distinguishable from normal folders because they have white folder icons instead of yellow folder icons as shown below.

SAS Management Console Virtual Folders

You can find out more information about this feature, including a few considerations you need to be aware of, by reading the Promoting Security Objects and Server Objects sub-section of the main Promotion Details for Specific Object Types section in the SAS 9.3 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide, Second Edition.

My security metadata promotion was a little more complicated than normal because I was also promoting some security metadata located in a custom repository. I normally avoid using custom repositories as much as possible (preferring to store everything in the Foundation repository and partitioning content with folders and ACTs). This is especially the case for security metadata: I’ve found that security metadata in custom repositories, being less visible, tends to get forgotten until it gets rediscovered whilst troubleshooting tricky security problems. Helping a customer resolve such problems was the reason we made security metadata from custom repositories highly visible in our Metacoda Security Plug-ins. We have since needed to keep some security metadata in custom repositories for the purposes of development and testing of our software. This is the custom repository security metadata I was attempting to promote, but it took me a little while to find it in the virtual folders …. Read More »

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Announcing the Metacoda MetaMetaMetaDataAnalyzer

By Paul Homes | Published: 1 April 2013

At Metacoda, we understand the importance of metadata for today’s modern fast-paced organizations. We know that software to help organizations manage and exploit their valuable metadata resources is increasingly valued as the volumes and breadths of data continues to grow in today’s big-data world.

A new growth area, that has yet to be fully exploited, is metadata about that metadata, metametadata if you will. With an eye to the future, and honouring the foresight of the (as yet to be released) 25-blade shaving razor, we recognize that customers will soon be needing to analyse metadata about the metadata for their primary metadata. We call this metametametadata.

Today we are announcing a new software product that will help you manage and fully understand the use of metametametadata in your organization, this will be our “Metacoda MetaMetaMetaDataAnalyzer“. Internally, this has been codenamed M3DA in honour of one of our favourite SciFi characters, and partly to prevent our developers getting hopelessly tongue-twisted during daily stand-up meetings.

If you too can see the future importance of metametametadata for your business, then don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity to obtain software tools to help you fully exploit it. To help your business gain a strategic business advantage over your competitors we will be offering this new product as a limited edition, with a production run of only 10 copies. Those 10 copies will be compiled from source code that will be subsequently destroyed to maintain its uniqueness. As an ephemeral product it will be available for 12 hours only on the 29Feb2014. Don’t miss out – add a reminder to your calendar now!

We can’t give away too much information at this early stage, so here’s a screenshot of the current prototype running in stealth mode:

MetaMetaMetaDataAnalyzer

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Protecting your Metadata Protections: Part 2

By Paul Homes | Published: 31 March 2013

SAS Management Console 9.3 showing default non-administrative capabilities.

In a guest post on blogs.sas.com in January, I wrote about protecting your metadata protections. In that post I said that “Ideally, a SAS® metadata security plan should address both ACT permissions and access to the Authorization Manager.” and went on to explain a method for addressing Access Control Template (ACT) permissions.

In this second part, I’ll talk about reducing access to the SAS Management Console Authorization Manager plug-in as further protection for your ACTs.

Of course, for some smaller SAS sites, and those with simple security requirements, this might be overkill. However, for other possibly larger organizations, those with potentially sensitive data/content, and perhaps those with specific regulatory requirements, it might be a necessity to implement a comprehensive metadata security implementation with multi-layered protections like these.

In the default metadata security implementations for SAS 9.3 and SAS 9.2, all SAS users have the capability to access a limited set of features in the SAS Management Console. This includes access to the Authorization Manager plug-in where any accidentally unprotected ACTs could be modified. In order to be able to take advantage of this capability, and modify an ACT, a user has to be able to fulfill all of the following requirements: Read More »

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Reading ‘Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET’

By Paul Homes | Published: 2 February 2013

Reading 'Custom Tasks for SAS® Enterprise Guide® Using Microsoft .NET' Chris Hemedinger’s new book Custom Tasks for SAS® Enterprise Guide® Using Microsoft .NET was recently released. If you have an idea for a really useful additional task you’d like to build for SAS Enterprise Guide, I strongly encourage you to read this book and find out how. I certainly got alot out of reading it and learning from Chris’ knowledge and experience.

I think I first spotted this book title about a year ago on SAS Publishing’s Upcoming Titles page. Since then I had been eagerly anticipating its release, so when it became available I was very keen to read it. I even got to provide a review for it too. You can read my review, along with several others, on the book’s reviews page.

One of the things I mentioned in my review was my desire to write a custom task to query SAS metadata from within SAS Enterprise Guide. After finishing the book, going through it a second time to pick up the bits I missed first time around :) , I then busily set about my .. hmm .. well .. ‘task’ …

…. and then sometime later I had a working ‘Metadata Column Finder‘ task. Here’s a screenshot of it in action: Read More »

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