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.