Tag: SAS Metadata

Getting Social with your SAS Metadata

At Metacoda we’re passionate about SAS® metadata. We want to encourage everyone in an organization to take advantage of it and contribute to it.

We’ve noticed how metadata is often disconnected from the discussions about it. Administrators and developers work intensely with metadata when they’re using SAS applications, but often discussions about the business meaning of that metadata, and the appropriate context in which it gets used, happens via email or in external documents. Emails are a relatively private closed discussion between a few people. That email resource will gradually get lost as people clean out their mailboxes and/or leave the organization. External documents might not be readily to hand, might be difficult to find, or even get lost completely.

We want to help people move those conversations about metadata into a centrally managed and universally available resource for everyone in an organization to use. They’ll be able to quickly and easily search for information (metadata) about business information assets and processes (libraries, tables, columns, information maps, reports, stored processes, jobs, job flows, servers, etc.) that are available in a SAS platform installation. They will benefit by reading past conversations about those items, including rich content with formatting, images and links. When they know something extra they can add it then and there. All of this can happen without everyone necessarily knowing about each other and about each others expertise.

To that end we have been busily working on a new Metacoda product that we believe will help organizations achieve this goal. We currently have it working with both SAS 9.3 and SAS 9.2. This blog post is a quick preview of it and a request for any interested parties to contact us about it. We’re looking for organizations that have a need for this type of software and want to reap the benefits of early involvement.

Focus Areas

Here’s a quick summary of the main focus areas for our new product. I’ll go into them in a bit more detail, together with some screenshots, later on in this post.

  • Activity: get notified about any changes and discussions on items of interest to you.
  • Search: find the items you want and register your interest in seeing activity for them.
  • Discussions: share your knowledge and learn from the knowledge and experience of others.
  • Easy Access: get easy access from anywhere: browsers on desktop PC’s, tablets, or smart phones, and even custom applications, add-ons, and plug-ins.
  • Performance: to make it as fast as we can, so you can find what you need, when you want it, and don’t miss out on shared knowledge because it takes too long or it’s too hard to find.
  • Security: only provide access to metadata you normally have access to.

So here’s a bit more info on these areas. Continue reading “Getting Social with your SAS Metadata”

SAS PROC METALIB and ODS OUTPUT

The SAS® METALIB Procedure, available in SAS 9.3, 9.2 and 9.1, is used to keep logical table metadata in sync with the physical tables that the metadata describes. It can also be used to report on any differences or discrepancies between the physical table and logical metadata descriptions. This post shows how ODS OUTPUT can be used in combination with PROC METALIB to capture its report output as SAS tables for further analysis and processing. Continue reading “SAS PROC METALIB and ODS OUTPUT”

SAS Metadata “V” Lengths

"V" Lengths I have been doing a lot of work on metadata searching lately, including basic XMLSELECT filtering, as part of our Metadata Security Plug-ins, in our effective permissions viewers, as well as the free Metadata Explorer utility. XMLSELECT is a feature in the SAS Open Metadata Interface that allows you to apply filters to metadata queries; you could think of it as a “Where Clause” for metadata.

One of the known limitations about XMLSELECT, that I’d not really paid much attention to in the past, relates to querying in potentially lengthy attributes – those with “V” lengths. This is documented in the SAS 9.3 Metadata Model: Reference document in the SAS Metadata Model Conventions section. It’s also documented in the equivalent SAS 9.2 page. Here’s the relevant quote from the documentation: Continue reading “SAS Metadata “V” Lengths”