Paul Homes – Page 15 – platformadmin.com

SAS Global Forum 2014 for Platform Administrators

SAS Global Forum 2014 is just around the corner and I’m getting really excited about it. There is so much content for SAS platform administrators this year. I had been thinking of posting a list of admin related papers I was keen to see, but then I saw that Greg Nelson from ThotWave wrote a SAS Users Groups blog post, “SAS Administration-palooza!”, which has a much more comprehensive list than I had. I’d encourage you to have a look through Greg’s list for some great suggestions to add to your schedule. I certainly picked up a few I had missed. If you can’t go to the conference itself then it’s also a great reading list for when the papers become available online.

If you’re a SAS platform administrator, or thinking of becoming one, I’d also suggest you sign up for Greg’s pre-conference tutorial on the Sunday morning “The Role of the SAS® Administrator: A Day in the Life of a Modern SAS Enterprise”

If you arrive on Saturday then you might also want to head along to the TweetUp too.

I hope to see you at #SASGF14. I’ll either be at those admin papers, walking around the demo hall checking out all the new cool SAS software, or at the Metacoda stand talking to people about our products. If you see me please say “Hello”.

Providing User Access to the SAS® BI Lineage Plug-in

I was asked yesterday whether it was possible to use the SAS® Management Console BI Lineage plug-in to provide non-administrators with the ability to review BI Lineage scans (as previously run by administrators). The BI Lineage plug-in can be used to do impact analysis for BI content (reports, information maps etc.) in a similar way that SAS Data Integration Studio provides impact analysis for DI content (jobs, tables, etc).

I’d never needed to do this before, so I did a little research. It didn’t take long to find the Granting Users Permission to View Scan Results section of the Using the BI Lineage Plug-in page in the SAS® 9.4 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide, Second Edition. That page explains how to open up access to the BILineage custom repository so that normal non-administrative users can get access to the scans (which are otherwise only available to unrestricted users). The document doesn’t get into explaining how to provide normal users with access to the BI Lineage plug-in itself so in this blog post I’m going to outline the steps required, with screenshots, to show the entire process. The end result of this process will be a BI Lineage Users group. You can then add normal non-administrative users as members of this group to provide them with access to both the BI Lineage plug-in and the scans in the BILineage repository.

The first step is to create the BI Lineage Users group. Continue reading “Providing User Access to the SAS® BI Lineage Plug-in”

Removing Custom Task Capability Metadata

Yesterday I saw a question on the SAS® Communities site from Nick about Registering Custom Tasks and managing the capability metadata that’s used for role based access control on those custom tasks. I found Nick’s question especially interesting because we have some free Metacoda Custom Tasks and those techniques can also be used to control access to them.

Nick had mentioned how he used SAS® Enterprise Guide® to register the capability metadata for some custom tasks, was asking about doing the same for the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and also about how one would go about removing the capability metadata. Chris Hemedinger later replied with a response that I found very useful. There was a link to one of his prior blog posts on the topic (Controlling access to custom tasks in SAS Enterprise Guide – The SAS Dummy) and some information on using RegAddin.exe to get the capability metadata populated for use by the Add-In. Chris also mentioned there was not a way to remove the custom task capability metadata short of the potentially dangerous technique of using the SAS Open Metadata Interface’s DeleteMetadata facility.

Having already registered the custom task metadata myself, I now needed a way to remove it so I could repeat the process for future documentation and testing purposes. I used the DeleteMetadata method. This is the main topic for this blog post and it serves 2 purposes: the first is that I wanted to document how I did it so I could do it again later; the second is that it was an opportunity for me to use the SAS Management Console XML Metadata Interface and capture a few screenshots along the way. I rarely use the SAS Management Console XML Metadata Interface and it’s always a journey of re-discovery every time I do. This time I wanted a permanent memory of the steps so I could refer to them again in future. I also ran into an interesting unknown-public-type issue that initially prevented me from deleting the capability metadata, so I’ll show how I resolved that too. Continue reading “Removing Custom Task Capability Metadata”

Creating a Metadata Bound Library with SAS 9.4

One of the nice enhancements in SAS® Management Console 9.4 is the addition of a point & click method for creating a Metadata Bound Library. Metadata Bound Libraries have been available since SAS 9.3 M2 but prior to SAS 9.4 you had to write proc authlib code to set one up (see this prior post for an example).

Many of the SAS platform administrators I meet have an IT admin background, not necessarily a SAS coding background, so this addition of a point & click method in SAS 9.4 will certainly make it easier for people to take advantage of metadata bound libraries. I find it makes it easier and I do have a SAS coding background. I don’t create metadata bound libraries every day, so I haven’t committed the syntax to memory yet :). Using the point & click method can be quicker than tracking down a code example.

Starting from the Folders tab in SAS Management Console 9.4, navigate to the /System/Secured Libraries folder. Right mouse click over the Secured Libraries folder and select the New and Secured Library menu items.

In the New Secured Library wizard, provide a name and description for the secured library, then click the Next button. Continue reading “Creating a Metadata Bound Library with SAS 9.4”

Password Encoder

I’ve noticed that whenever I need a pwencoded password, it seems to coincide with me not having a SAS® coding interface readily available (DMS, SAS Enterprise Guide®, SAS Data Integration Studio etc.). On the other hand, I almost always have a SAS Management Console session open. For this reason I’ve added a small Password Encoder utility to our Metacoda Plug-ins product which will be available in the next maintenance release (3.0 R4). What’s more, this Password Encoder will be a free-of-charge utility along with the existing ACT Reviewer and Metadata Explorer.

It’s accessible from the SAS Management Console Tools menu:

It displays a window Continue reading “Password Encoder”