Category: General

Metacoda’s Metadata Explorer Plug-in

Update 15Jun2015: The Metadata Explorer plug-in discussed in this blog post was first made publicly available with Metacoda Plug-ins V3.0. It has been enhanced in subsequent releases and now supports additional SAS platform versions beyond those originally mentioned in this post (such as SAS 9.4). For more information on supported SAS versions, please see the Metacoda Plug-ins System Requirements page.

My work at Metacoda involves lots of metadata, as does my work as in SAS® platform administration. I spend a lot of time looking inside SAS metadata repositories, searching for objects, looking at their attributes, following their associations to other objects, and generally getting to grips with the SAS Metadata Model. I write programs that use the SAS Open Metadata Interface, primarily using the SAS Java Metadata Interface, but sometimes using the SAS Language Interface to Metadata usually via PROC METADATA.

When I originally started to explore metadata, I used the metabrowse feature in Foundation SAS. I really liked it, but I’m not always working on, or have easy access to, a machine that has Base SAS installed (and I wanted to do some more extensive searching). I do spend a lot of time inside the SAS Management Console though. I tried using the XML Metadata Interface in SAS Management Console 9.1 for a short while but found it made me think too much about how to do the query, rather than what it was I was looking for. I also found working with the raw XML results returned by the XML Metadata Interface plug-in was a bit challenging too and it distracted me from my original purpose of finding metadata. As an aside, the SAS Management Console XML Metadata Interface plug-in is no longer available by default in SAS Management Console 9.2 and 9.3, but it is still available. If you need it, you can find instructions on how to enable it in a SAS Global Forum 2012 paper.

Now, as many programmers do when they can’t quite find what they are looking for, they write their own tools, and this is what I did. “scratching an itch” is a term I often hear programmers use to describe this. My goals for this ideal metadata exploration tool, which evolved over time, were along these lines: Continue reading “Metacoda’s Metadata Explorer Plug-in”

Getting Certified

As a (certified) SAS platform administrator I often get asked how best to prepare for the SAS Certified Platform Administrator 9 exam.

I don’t have a magic formula other than study and experience. My standard response is to direct people to the best place I know where you can find out more: that’s the SAS support page specifically about exam preparation.


From my own experience I’d recommend the following steps:

Continue reading “Getting Certified”

SAS & IWA: Check the Logs

When testing Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) based client connections to SAS® platform servers, it is well worth checking the SAS logs to verify the connections are being made the way you expect. SAS has a variety of methods up it’s sleeve to get you authenticated, including cached credentials, retrieving stored credentials from metadata, SAS token authentication etc. Looking in the SAS server logs will help you identify the connection/authentication events and methods used. In the past I’ve thought I was using IWA+Kerberos but when I looked in the log it was obvious I wasn’t! I think it’s essential when testing/troubleshooting a new IWA configuration to review the SAS server logs for both failed and successful connections.

In a previous post “SAS and IWA: Two Hops” I mentioned how sometimes it’s necessary to force the use of Kerberos with IWA to be able to make IWA delegated connections to secondary servers. So here’s some examples of what we might see in SAS server logs Continue reading “SAS & IWA: Check the Logs”

Second Birthday

It’s PlatformAdmin.com’s 2nd birthday this week!

The past 2 years have gone very quickly I must say. I set out with a goal of writing a least 1 post every month. Not very ambitious I know, but realistic for me nonetheless! I’ve never been much of a writer. I’ve always been impressed by people who appear to write so well, and even more so by those that have the stamina and skill to author and publish a book. Maths, Science & Computers have always been my thing ever since way back in school and I have generally avoided writing unless I had to. I do remember reading a blog post by Joel Spolsky a while back where he said that “Writing is a muscle. The more you write, the more you’ll be able to write.” It sounded pretty reasonable to me. As a training course instructor I’ve always found that one of the great benefits of teaching was that I necessarily had to learn much more of the details for whatever I was teaching. I’ve found that the same appears to be true about writing publicly accessible blog posts. The fear of being asked tough questions or being challenged on topics turns into the pleasure of learning more!

Well, I’m pleased to say that Continue reading “Second Birthday”

SAS & IWA: Reviewing SPNs

My last post was about configuring additional Service Principal Names (SPNs) in Active Directory to support the use of Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) in a SAS® platform installation that uses host name aliases in preference to physical host names.

When working on a SAS & IWA setup like this, I’d start by reviewing the currently registered SPNs for all of the SAS servers involved (as well as any other servers that might be accessed from a SAS server using IWA). This gives an idea of what SPNs might have already been added, which ones still need to be added, and potentially which ones might need to be removed.

This is the command I use Continue reading “SAS & IWA: Reviewing SPNs”