Tag: SAS

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”

Password Encoding with SAS

Quick note from Paul: I’m really excited that platformadmin.com’s very first guest post is from the well known blogger and author Tricia Aanderud. I suspect you already know Tricia, but just in case you don’t …

Tricia Aanderud, president of And Data, Inc., provides SAS® consulting services to corporations who need assistance understanding how to transform their data into meaningful charts, reports, and dashboards. Tricia has been an enthusiastic SAS user since 2002 and has presented papers at the SAS Global Forum and other industry conferences. She is the co-author of two SAS BI books, “Building Business Intelligence with SAS: Content Development Examples” and “The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes”.

Now over to Tricia …

I frequently find myself querying the metadata to assist with understanding a new customer system or trying to navigate one of my demo systems. As a result, I find I have many utilities that I want to share with customers. However, since these connect to the metadata with an active password, I don’t want to share my password. Using the SAS PWENCODE procedure, I can encode my password in a SAS program and voilà! a way to share the code and shield the password.

Encoding the Password

The PWENCODE procedure allows you to encode passwords that are used in place of plaintext passwords in SAS programs.

The following figure shows the PWENCODE procedure in a simple way. My example password, Pa55w0rd!, is placed in quotes. You can use different encoding methods, which you can read more about in the SAS PWENCODE procedure documentation.

The encoded password appears in the Continue reading “Password Encoding with SAS”

Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2012

These are some of my favourite papers from SAS Global Forum 2012 last month. I didn’t to get to see as many papers in person as I’d originally planned; we were very busy at our Metacoda stand. So it was great that the papers had already been published before the event as I’d already read most of the ones I missed.

As you will see from the list below, Continue reading “Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2012”