Category: General

PlatformAdmin.com now has a Blog Roll (and roll of rolls)

Thanks to Andy Ratcliffe for adding platformadmin.com to his blog roll on NOTE:.

This was a timely reminder for me to add a blog roll to this platformadmin.com blog, something I had been meaning to do for some time now, and so I was prompted to make a start on it. You can find the initial blog roll in the column on the right hand side of this page.

My intention with this blog roll is not to list every SAS related blog I read because there are already a few other better, more definitive blog rolls available. I will just add a few of my favourite ones, especially those where I have seen some platform admin related content in the past. The ones I am starting off by adding are:

  • NOTE: The blog of RTSL.eu: Andy Ratcliffe’s blog has a number of articles on architecture, admin, backup, DI, BI, OLAP etc.
  • real business intelligence for real users: Angela Hall’s blog is a veritable encyclopaedia of SAS BI related information useful for SAS platform administrators – not to be missed!
  • The SAS Dummy: Chris Hemedinger’s blog has many articles of interest to admins managing SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office installations.

If you are after a more complete list of SAS related blogs and RSS feeds I would also recommend the following:

… you might think of this as a blog roll of blog rolls! :)

BTW if you are daunted by the amount of SAS related information out there I would highly recommend Google Reader. I switched a few months ago and since then have been able to skim read a lot more resources, in a lot less time, from any device at hand (iPad, Android phone, MacBook, Linux notebook etc.) and being a web app all the devices are always in sync with each other. I’d be lost without it now.

New Targeted Admin Courses from SAS

Checking my inbox today I saw an email from SAS Education with new course dates for 2010/2011. What really caught my eye was the addition of these new short (1-2 day) targeted admin courses:

It’s great to see more admin training available from SAS Institute, especially these targeted courses. I was often asked by people what training was available to help them administer their SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Enterprise Miner installations. These new courses seem designed just for them. Of course, there’s still the 5 day SAS Platform Administration: Fast Track course too.

Now there are even more resources to help those who might want to become a certified administrator.

Resources for Designing and Configuring I/O Subsystems for SAS® Software

As a SAS platform administrator, I often find myself discussing the importance of well designed I/O subsystems with customers and I.T administrators/architects. Sometimes it can be a challenge explaining how important it is for SAS applications to have a high sustained sequential I/O throughput. In some cases they may not consider I/O requirements for SAS software as any different to other applications they are running. In other cases, with the knowledge that it is enterprise software, they may make the well intended assumption to treat it like databases they have experience of and aim for high numbers of small transactional random I/O’s per second. It can be unfortunate when I/O storage decisions and purchases happen before a consultant with SAS software experience gets involved. The purpose of this post is to provide links to a number of resources that can help you make your case for a well designed and configured I/O subsystem for your SAS software installation. I like to provide references to papers by SAS Institute employees because of the value that vendor statements have in reinforcing what I am saying.

These are the papers from SAS Institute that I refer to most often when talking about I/O. They contain very useful information you can use when putting forward your case for high performance I/O subsystems in hardware purchases. If your I.T. administrators are up to a little extra reading it can also provide them with some of the insight they might need when choosing and tuning hardware suitable for use with SAS software. I think the “How to Maintain Happy SAS® Users” paper is a great read for both SAS administrators and the I.T. administrators who work with them.

How to Maintain Happy SAS® Users
Margaret Crevar, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC
SAS Global Forum 2009 Paper 310-2009
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/310-2009.pdf
Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Storage Configurations
Margaret Crevar & Tony Brown, SAS Institute Inc.
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings10/FAQforStorageConfiguration.pdf
Best Practices for Configuring your IO Subsystem for SAS®9 Applications
Margaret A. Crevar, Tony Brown & Leigh A. Ihnen, SAS Institute Inc.
SAS Global Forum 2007
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/rnd/papers/sgf07/sgf2007-iosubsystem.pdf
Improving SAS® I/O Throughput by Avoiding the Operating System File Cache
Leigh Ihnen & Mike Jones, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC
SAS Global Forum Paper 327-2009
PDF available from http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings09/327-2009.pdf

If you would like to add to this list any other papers or resources you know of, that help explain the I/O characteristics of SAS software and appropriate I/O architecture guidelines/recommendations, then please let me know.

Updated 15Sep2010: added Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Storage Configurations to the list of papers.
Updated 04Dec2010: thanks to June’s comment, updated link to more recent version of the How to Maintain Happy SAS® Users paper.

Promoting Job Flows

I am occasionally asked whether it is possible to promote job flows between metadata repositories (e.g. DEV to TEST to PROD) using the SAS package file (SPK) import/export promotion feature. In past consulting work I have needed to promote job flows containing hundreds of jobs all interlinked with dependencies, so this is a topic close to my heart :)

In the early days of SAS 9.1.3 import/export of job flows was not supported and so the only choices availably back then were to either manually reconstruct the jobs flows in the target environment or do a full replication/promotion (what used to be called full promotion in SAS 9.1.3 is now called replication in SAS 9.2). Manually reconstructing jobs flows was a tedious and error-prone process especially with large and complicated job flows. Full replication/promotion was often not appropriate because it would overwrite the target environment completely. But that’s all history (and has been for a while) …

With SAS 9.2 there is no question about it – import and export of job flows is standard with SAS 9.2 so I will ignore it for the rest of this post and concentrate on SAS 9.1.3 instead.

Since the import/export of job flows was not initially supported in SAS 9.1.3, I occasionally talk to people who assume it’s still the case now (which is understandable). It’s great to see the smile spread across their faces when they find out it is actually possible with SAS 9.1.3 today – I remember back to how I felt when I first found out. I was faced with the prospect of manually reconstructing some awe-inspiring job flows and contacted SAS on the off-chance that someone might know a better way – which is how I was lucky enough to get to try out an early version. You can imagine how happy I was.

The ability to perform partial promotion of job flows crept relatively quietly into SAS 9.1.3 with a couple of hotfixes some time back. There is a usage note about it now too: Usage Note 31008: Hot Fixes 913SMC04 and 14JPS02 provide the capability to add job flows using partial promotion

So if you need to promote job flows between SAS 9.1.3 environments here are some pointers that you might find useful:

  • Promote the job flows using the SAS Management Console 9.1 BI Manager plug-in. Last time I tried I couldn’t export job flows from SAS Data Integration Studio 3.4 (even with the latest hotfixes at the time). I last looked many months ago though, so happy to be corrected if that has changed since.
  • Make sure the SAS Management Console 9.1 client installation you will be using (most likely your workstation) has been updated to at least the level of hotfix 913SMC04. I would tend to install the most recent SAS Management Console 9.1 hotfix 913SMC08 instead.
  • This is already in the instructions for 913SMC08, but you also need to ensure the client installation you will be using (most likely your workstation) has been updated to the level of SAS Foundation Services 1.4 hotfix 14JPS02. You might recognize SAS Foundation Services 1.4 from mid-tier installations, but it also contributes the BI Manager plug-in to SAS Management Console 9.1 client installations.
  • Using BI Manager in the source repository track down the folder containing the job flows you want to export and export them into a SAS package (SPK) file. If you can’t find the job flows try looking in the /Shared Data folder. Here is a screenshot showing job flows being exported from SAS Management Console 9.1:
  • Using BI Manager in the target repository import the job flows from the previously exported SAS package (SPK) file. Once imported you will need to re-schedule the flows.

Tracking Down the SAS Management Console Log File

Recently I have been updating the documentation for our Metacoda Security Plug-ins relating to their use with SAS® 9.2. In our documentation we mention the SAS Management Console log file as a potential source of support information if help is needed. The SAS Management Console log file can provide clues such as error messages and stack traces. Our software writes information messages to the log file too. It’s a good starting point for troubleshooting.

With SAS 9.1 the location of the SAS Management Console log file was easy to remember. With SAS 9.2 it has moved a little deeper into the file system and I haven’t yet committed its location to memory … which I’m sure will happen soon … perhaps even by the end of this post :).

As I was updating our documentation I was hoping that I could add a reference to a location in the official SAS documentation where people could find out more about the SAS Management Console log file. I couldn’t find any specific information about the log file itself but did see a few references to it in other sections. In some cases the documentation I did find differed a little from my own experiences and so in the rest of this post I will refer to the SAS documentation and also mention where it might differ from my own experience with the software.

The default location for the SAS Management Console log file depends on both the SAS software version you are using as well as the operating system you are running it on.

SAS Management Console 9.1

In my use of SAS Management Console 9.1 I have found that it writes its log to a file named errorLog_SAS_Management_Console.txt in the user’s home directory by default. Potential log file locations for someone with a userid of paul might include:

Windows®
C:\Documents and Settings\paul\errorLog_SAS_Management_Console.txt
UNIX
/home/paul/errorLog_SAS_Management_Console.txt

This differs from SAS® 9.1.3 Management Console User’s Guide, Chapter 2 Setting up SAS Management Console in the section Using the Error Log which has:

This file is named errorlog.txt, and is located by default in the SAS Management Console directory.

SAS Management Console 9.2

With SAS Management Console 9.2 the log file has been renamed to SASMCErrorLog.txt and has relocated a few subdirectories down in the user’s home directory.

I found a SAS documentation reference to the log file location in the SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide in a section named Troubleshooting a Replication Job. It mentions the following potential locations for SASMCErrorLog.txt:

  • On Windows Vista systems: C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.2
  • On other Windows systems: C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.2
  • On UNIX systems: user’s-home-directory/SAS/SASManagementConsole/9.2

The default location and layout of the Windows user profile changed with Windows Vista which explains why the SAS Management Console log file location is different from Windows Vista onwards. Having installed SAS Management Console 9.2 in Windows 7 I have seen that this new log file location applies to Windows 7 too.

The UNIX location as specified in the SAS documentation reference above differs from my own experience with a Linux based installation of SAS Management Console 9.2. On Linux I found SASMCErrorLog.txt was in the location user’s-home-directory/.SASAppData/SASManagementConsole/9.2/

Combining my own experiences with information from the SAS documentation, potential locations for the SAS Management Console 9.2 log file for someone with a userid of paul might include:

Windows 7, Windows Vista
C:\Users\paul\AppData\Roaming\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.2\SASMCErrorLog.txt
Windows (versions prior to Windows Vista)
C:\Documents and Settings\paul\Application Data\SAS\SASManagementConsole\9.2\SASMCErrorLog.txt
UNIX, Linux
/home/paul/.SASAppData/SASManagementConsole/9.2/SASMCErrorLog.txt

Of course these paths will need to be adjusted if your system administrators have configured operating system installations at your site to store home directories / user profiles in alternative locations.

I would be interested to find out if anyone has found their SAS Management Console log file in any locations other than these.