Angela offers tips on using the SAS Business Intelligence solutions. She manages a team of SAS Fraud Framework implementers within the SAS Solutions On-Demand organization. Angela also has co-written two books, 'Building BI using SAS, Content Development Examples' & 'The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes'.
There are only four more days before the big kickoff! But for many of us (including me), the countdown to SAS Global Forum 2012 began last fall with the submission of paper ideas to the incredibly awesome section chair volunteers. I live for this event, the networking, training opportunities, customer
PROC STP is a new procedure for SAS 9.3 Stored Processes. It's so new and different that I have not had the opportunity to use it yet in a customer engagement. When writing about it for the now released "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" book, I had
I have previously spoken about using custom formats and from SAS Information Maps and how they can be used to categorize data differently for your end users. The problem for some is that this requires establishing the format on the SAS server, typically on lockdown by the SAS Administrator. Another
When you are constantly taking the data tables and completing joins to begin working on your reports or analysis it might be time to consider creating permanent views. Then you can just add the view to the Enterprise Guide project rather than dealing with the joins in a Query Builder
After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer's internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special
During IFSUG yesterday, Sunil Gupta gave attendees to his presentation a special homework assignment. Look into the SAS Enterprise Guide task 'Characterize Data'. Sunil suggested that this was a simple approach to quickly getting a summary of all the variables within your data table. Of course, some programmers will use
Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated
At the IFSUG conference this week in Cary, NC I met Stephen Harris from Bank of America. Stephen gave the talk "Manage Your Partners Before You Manage Your Dashboards: Designing Great Dashboards" covering the business aspects of successfully implementing dashboards. When you back up for a second to consider the
Well, we can't really afford to give everyone a free copy of the Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples. But copies will be presented to two randomly selected participants of today's AllAnalytics.com eChat! Then you can be a part of the celebrations! Yes, that's right! People have been
Unlike BASE SAS tables, OLAP cubes must exist in within the metadata in order to access from any of the OLAP Viewers. In addition to having some metadata OLAP cubes have a physical file structure presence (at least for MOLAP/HOLAP because it's a different story for ROLAP). When you refresh
One of the cool things with SAS OLAP Viewer in Add-in to Microsoft Office is your ability to skip right into a specific value. Out of the box, viewing OLAP cubes can lead you to believe that in order to view a specific value you need to click-thru a hierarchy
Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember
Many of the chapters in my new book Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples were straightforward to write but one in particular was the beast. Neither Tricia nor I wanted to tackle the SAS BI Dashboard chapter. Just chalk it up to no major work experience with this
Recently I've made several online purchases buying eBooks for the new Amazon Kindle my daughter received as a holiday gift. The online checkout process is very straight-forward, especially with the 'Continue' buttons that change to a 'Place your order' button on the final step. Did you know that the same
When developing content in SAS BI Dashboard, such as indicators, ranges, and dashboards, knowing how to name them is pretty important. If changes are required later (for instance to improve the administrators capability of partial promoting content) much more work is required to ensure the links between the objects isn't
As many of you have already noticed, my LinkedIn profile and the blog profile blurb have changed. I took on an exciting new job in the SAS Solutions OnDemand team. The official title is Software Development Manager, but what I really do is lead a team of fraud solution architects.
In one minute (and 10 seconds, but are you measuring that?) you can add a custom measure (also known as calculated members) to your OLAP cube. Watch this video to create a simple calculation multiplying units * price. Remember that this mechanism is not just used for multiplications, you can
OLAP cube developers might have noticed that the amount of time required to generate any aggregation (including the NWAY) can negatively impact their productivity. Developers remove the NWAY aggregation (following the sample screens in a prior post) to significantly reduce build time and allow quick modifications to the cube definition.
Drill-through to detail is the ability to right click within a cell of a web report or OLAP viewer and request the detail source records that make up that specific cell's measure. The maximum number of records, by default, is set to 300,000. Feasibly the report user could download all
As I mentioned when creating a user-defined format for Information Maps in a prior post custom or user-defined formats can be created and stored quickly in the default format catalog for all Business Intelligence products within "Lev1SASAppSASEnvironmentSASFormats". This is useful for custom sorting, reclassifying or grouping data as well as
Years ago and a seemingly far galaxy away, I wrote about how to modify 9.1.3 to start Enterprise Guide users in a different location for the File folder. By default, the user only can access their personal SAS Temporary File. Why change this? I would prefer to use a central
If you are unable to export BI Dashboard Content the BI Dashboard Logical types was not installed on the system running SAS Management Console. Update this by following these steps Run the software install from the SAS Depot (mine is located at C:SAS Software Depotsetup.exe) Select ‘Install Additional Software’ Then
Which would you rather do? Click stop (or start) over and over, while waiting in between the services to make sure everything is up and running ... OR ... click one button and go have lunch? Honestly I prefer the lunch option. (And for administrators, the quickest option is always
Functionality to upload files onto the SAS server (from 9.2 on) is available using stored processes and an html input type="file". I introduced this topic last year in my blog post using the SAS Stored Process Developer Guide sample. Of course, it is never as easy as the sample is
Business Problem: The traffic lighting (red/green/yellow) range is different for one group/category than the others but the indicator needs to include all group values. Recommendation: It's all in the data. Here is an example. For the Candy_Sales_Summary data (located in the EG Sample Data folder) there are three groups of
Every six months or so I try to find a recent picture that captures who I am and what I am feeling. Loading this into my various social/online profiles in Twitter, SAS Community, Forums, LinkedIn, corporate internal, Facebook etc then take me a bit of time to implement. Wouldn't it
If you would like to link users to a specific section within a Web Report Studio report, there is a quick way to generate the URL. Just send yourself an email from Web Report Studio. A parameter &rsTS is included in the link which corresponds to the specific section selected.
One of the sweet new capabilities in 9.2 OLAP for cube developers is the Cube Job that is automatically created for each new cube. The job is used as a interface mechanism to schedule the cube refresh code without manually retrieving the PROC OLAP code and customizing it for scheduling which we "old"
When trying to write out graphics to a specific filename location, the gsfname option is only honored when ODS LISTING is turned on and ODS HTML is turned off. This is especially important in 9.3 Base SAS as the ODS HTML option is the default output destination. Enterprise Guide users
I've been spending my weekends developing a SAS Publishing book proposal. (For those interested, it involves learning how to fully leverage SAS Stored Processes as a beginning programmer.) Creating examples and jumping between coding, testing and then writing about everything, I have had a heck of a time with my
