Tag: SAS

SAS Administrator Series on SAS Users Groups Blog

If you’re a SAS platform administrator and you subscribe to the SAS® Tech Report you probably noticed the following snippet in the November 2012 issue:

And take a look at the new series for SAS administrators on the SAS Users Groups blog. Christina and I plan to give administrators information that includes talking with IT, storage and IO subsystems.

Waynette Tubbs
Editor, SAS Tech Report

I’m really looking forward to following this series of blog posts and hearing about the experiences and opinions of lots of other SAS platform administrators. There have been a few posts already and I was also excited that I was recently able to contribute something too: IT skills or SAS skills–what’s more important?

It sounds like there are going to be lots of great topics from a number of different contributors, so be sure to bookmark it as another resource for SAS platform administrators.

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”

SAS 9.3 Framework Data Server (and the missing license)

Whilst troubleshooting why my SAS 9.3 Framework Data Server wasn’t starting I discovered that, unlike Foundation SAS where the license (a.k.a. SID or setinit) is applied once a year, the SAS Framework Data Server requires the presence of a setinit.sas during every start up. Mine had been deleted. I’m not 100% sure how that came to be but I suspect it was probably one of two things: Continue reading “SAS 9.3 Framework Data Server (and the missing license)”

Running SAS on Ubuntu Linux: Dash to Bash

It happened to me again today … the Ubuntu dash-bash-default-shell-thing:

userid@hostname:~$ /opt/sas92/SASFoundation/9.2/sas
/bin/sh: 0: Illegal option -p
userid@hostname:~$ /opt/sas93/SASFoundation/9.3/sas
/bin/sh: 0: Illegal option -p

I encounter this every now and then. This time I was upgrading my notebook and it’s Ubuntu 64-bit installation to 12.10 and restoring SAS 9.2 & 9.3 installations from backup.

Several years ago the default shell symlink of /bin/sh to /bin/bash was changed to /bin/dash in Ubuntu. You can find out more about the reasoning behind Ubuntu’s switch from bash to dash here – it caused quite a bit of discussion when it happened.

The often suggested fix is to manually change the /bin/sh symlink, but there’s also a command to do it (which also fixes the associated man page symlink too):

Continue reading “Running SAS on Ubuntu Linux: Dash to Bash”