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.

Farewell to the SAS 9.2 Replication Wizard

It looks like the SAS® 9.2 Replication Wizard has recently been deprecated. I spotted a new SAS usage note about it the other day: Usage Note 40834: The Replication Wizard in SAS® 9.2 has been deprecated.

The Replication Wizard is, or perhaps I should now say was, a feature available in the SAS 9.2 Management Console (via Metadata Manager > Metadata Utilities > Replication) that could be used to completely replicate metadata from a source environment into a target environment (such as Development to Test , Lev3 to Lev2 etc). The alternative to replication is to promote selected subsets of metadata using the import/export wizards and SAS package (.SPK) files. This selective promotion method is sometimes known as partial promotion. Although replication might sound tempting initially, in practice the import/export methods are much more versatile (as long as they support the metadata you want to promote – significant improvements with SAS 9.2).

Unlike import/export where you promote a subset of metadata, with replication you were promoting all of the metadata in one hit (with optional substitution of things like host names, ports, paths etc), completely discarding any existing metadata in the target environment. You had to configure a fair bit of infrastructure in order to use replication, perform a few manual steps and then manually promote any associated physical (non-metadata) content. It seemed like a lot of work (and knowledge) for something you would probably only ever use once or twice (if ever), so I think it’s understandable why SAS Institute would retire this feature. I don’t imagine it got used enough to warrant continued development and testing. I suspect that most people used import/export (partial) promotion almost exclusively, even for the initial promotion into a newly installed environment.

I was always a little bit worried with replication that someone might accidentally get the 2 environments reversed and totally wipe out their source environment, overwriting it with metadata from their old or empty target environment! Another good reason to backup both environments before replicating :)

One of the benefits to replication was that it allowed you to promote portal pages (which are not currently supported with import/export as far as I know). Although it sounds like a good reason to use replication, you could only ever realistically use it once due to the all-or-nothing nature of replication. After the first replication any portal changes in the target environment (e.g. Production/Lev1) would be lost on subsequent replications. I had heard a rumour that promotion of portal pages was in the pipeline but haven’t heard anything more since. Does anyone reading this know what the current status of support for portal promotion is?

I personally hope that the list of supported metadata objects for the import/export promotion facility is extended in future to include things like ACTs, Users, Groups, Roles, Servers and Portal Pages – things that don’t reside in folders. That would round it out very nicely I think.

Updated 30Sep2010: I just spotted some information about portal content promotion in the SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform: Web Application Administration Guide, Third Edition. You can find it in Chapter 20 Introduction to SAS Information Delivery Portal Administration under Main Tasks for Administering the Portal in the section named Promote Portal Content. It states (in part) “Beginning with SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3, a content promotion tool is available. This tool consists of stand-alone batch scripts, shell scripts, and metadata extraction templates.”

Updated 08Oct2010: In this SAS Discussion Forum comment Technolero mentions that it may be possible to get an early (potentially unsupported) version of the portal content promotion tool by contacting SAS Technical Support.

Updated 16Dec2010: SAS Information Delivery Portal 4.3 was recently released and the SAS documentation updated. There is a link to documentation for the new portal promotion facilities in the post Updated SAS Admin Docs (inc Portal Promotion).

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.

Default Role / Capability Matrices for SAS® 9.2

Have you ever worked on a SAS 9.2 installation where someone has modified the capabilities of the predefined roles, and you need to reset them back to the default configuration? Or perhaps you are trying to see if there is a particular capability and want to search using a keyword, rather than manually reading through the list in SAS Management Console?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then you might want to check out the SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform Desktop Application Administration Guide (PDF, HTML) and the SAS® 9.2 Intelligence Platform Web Application Administration Guide, Third Edition (PDF, HTML).

Each of the SAS applications that support roles has a matrix showing the available capabilities for that application and how those capabilities map to the application’s predefined roles. If you need to reset the predefined roles then these matrices provide the information you need. Alternatively, if you want to search for a particular capability then you can use your web-browser/PDF-viewer’s find tool to look for keywords like library, OLAP or Join.

Here is a quick list of links to the specific pages containing the role/capability matrices for each application:

On a side note, if any SAS developers or product managers happen to read this post, I think it would be great if you could search/filter capabilities in SAS Management Console. There are lots of capabilities to look through and I can only imagine the list getting longer in future versions of SAS. Perhaps a reset-role-to-default-capabilities feature too? :) Perhaps I should make a SASware Ballot suggestion.