Month: April 2010

Best Practices with SAS® 9 Metadata Security

As I mentioned in a previous post, I will be doing a presentation at SAS Forum Australia & New Zealand 2010 titled Best Practices with SAS® 9 Metadata Security. The abstract for this presentation is as follows:

SAS® 9 metadata security is becoming increasingly more important as SAS® 9 platform installations continue to grow and evolve. With more content, larger user communities and a wider variety of application interfaces, time-poor SAS platform administrators are looking for better ways to manage security with their organisations valuable metadata and data resources.

Knowledge and use of current SAS® 9 metadata security best practices can be a key differentiator between stressed platform administrators and well organised administrators. One group might spend their time applying ad-hoc quick fixes and tracking down authorisation conflicts, whereas the other group will plan ahead to reduce day-to-day overheads and minimise the impact of change.

This paper will provide an outline of some of the key SAS® 9 metadata security best practices together with information on where to go to find out more.

Of course this is a large topic for the time available, and so the presentation will provide an overview with a few examples. My plan is that this blog will act as a companion to the presentation. I will post articles here that provide further information with links to online materials that should be useful to other platform administrators wanting to find out more about the topic.

What is platformadmin.com?

This is my brand new blog and I thought I’d better start by explaining who I am, why I created it, and what I am going to be using it for.

My name is Paul Homes and I have been working with SAS® software for over 20 years. In that time I have worked for a variety of companies in a variety of roles. These days I spend my time doing short term SAS consulting projects, teaching the occasional course and creating plug-ins that integrate with SAS software.

I should have been blogging ages ago, but always wondered what I would blog about. Most of the work I do these days is related to SAS platform administration and working with SAS metadata, so I thought that would be a good place to start.

I created platformadmin.com as a place where I could jot down my thoughts, notes, handy techniques, code fragments and other general stuff related to managing SAS software installations and SAS metadata. There is a wealth of useful 3rd party materials online too, including SAS documents, SAS usage notes and other people’s blogs. I often find myself revisiting the same places time and time again but, having forgotten to bookmark them in the first place, I end up searching for them anew each time, so now I will link to them from this blog.

Although I created this blog primarily for my own purposes, to jog my memory and help me find stuff again, I hope that other people working with SAS metadata or as SAS platform administrators will also find it useful. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please let me know by either commenting on the articles or sending me an email or tweet.

The types of topics I plan to cover in this blog include:

  • SAS platform administration
  • SAS metadata security
  • Working with SAS metadata and the SAS Open Metadata Interface
  • Operating system topics (Linux, UNIX, Windows) that might be useful for SAS platform administrators
  • Using Metacoda software for SAS platform administration

I work for Metacoda where I develop plug-ins to integrate with SAS software for the purpose of enhancing metadata access. I also use Metacoda software in SAS platform admin consulting work, so I plan to blog about how I find Metacoda software helps me in that role.