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'.
As I have previously mentioned, SAS 9.3 has some sweet new functionality for stored processes. The topic of the prior post was on storing .sas code for the stored process directly within the metadata and how to edit/access that raw code. Did you know that the 'Edit Source Code' button
I mentioned back in 2008 that Web Reports with OLAP source can drill-through to detail (or display the raw data records for the corresponding cross tabular cell) only after the source information map has drill-through to detail enabled. Well, there are several other areas that also could disable this capability
In BI Dashboard 4.3, you have the ability to edit or entirely remove the frame around an indicator. When in the dashboard edit screen, select the indicator and on the right hand side update the Object name with the frame title to display. When viewing this indicator from the Portal
Co-written with Gordon Cox@gtcox76 Gordon’s 7-yr daughter asked him what he learned in class at SAS Campus a few weeks ago. The subject, even for many SAS geeks like us, can be hard to tackle. Gordon was learning all about SAS GRID architecture, implementations, and usage. Well try to explain
New in 9.3, stored processes can be assigned to run on the 'Default Server' server type. Developers can still force the stored process to run on only one server type but choosing the 'Default Server' allows the client application to specifically call the best server type to run on. Another cool
There is some sweet new functionality in 9.3 stored processes. One of them I particularly like is the additional option to store the SAS code within the metadata rather than in a separate .sas file. This is extremely beneficial when allowing the stored process to run on multiple application servers. It also could
Chris mentions in his FAQ post on 9.3 and Enterprise Guide that the new stored processes and other new metadata can not leverage all of the functionality in the new 9.3 release. EG is nice to remind us of that fact when we open the SAS Folders view with the
According to the SAS Documentation http://support.sas.com/resources/thirdpartysupport/v92m3/browsers.html Windows 7 machines should use Internet Explorer 8. Unfortunately Microsoft will no longer allow installations of IE 8 on Windows 7 machines. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/downloads/ie-8 I was able to get all the web applications to work on Google Chrome however the BI Dashboard appears but not all
Just got some time to begin playing with the 9.3 Enterprise Business Intelligence installation on my SAS laptop. As I was testing out the web applications, SASWebDoc opened but I couldn't get to the SAS login screen up to access the SAS Stored Process web application. First I started perusing my
Creating shared prompts to use across the various BI clients requires the use of SAS Management Console's stored process wizard. Editing these prompts after they have been shared requires some forethought. The important thing to consider when making any changes to a prompt's properties is the impact these changes could
New in 9.2, SAS Folders are used to organize the metadata around various content and BI objects. I wrote about this many moons ago but the subject still comes up as more customers get started with the Business Intelligence architecture. As you can see in the initial SAS Folder structure,
In order to support a SAS Server Architecture, administrators must know where all the log files from the various SAS Business Intelligence services are located. By default, each service that generates a log will create it within the services' own configuration folder structure. For example, the metadata server log is
Each indicator added to the dashboard begins with the saved name of the indicator. Take the example below, I dragged the spark table indicator '02_Top_CustomerSAT' into the new dashboard. Of course the 02_Top_CustomerSAT name is not necessarily what my executives would like to see on their dashboard view. But I
Within BI Dashboard 4.3, you can change the font styles on different elements within the Dashboard. This is a global change to all the indicators displayed on the dashboard as you are unable to modify at an indicator level fonts for titles, cells, etc. Ranges are placed on indicators and
I was presented with a design approach yesterday that included one web report duplicated multiple times for each group in the organization. Each web report then used essentially an identical information map with the difference of only a filter. Instead of using a single web report with a prompted filter (or copying the web
When looking to add the Stored Process Alert Process (useful to see whether processes run in the BACKGROUND were completed successfully) the specific portlet type is not on the list. No worries, it's actually a personal portlet that is defined to present only YOUR stored process execution results. Therefore to locate
In order to make the OLAP drill through data available as data tables in the Enterprise Guide, all you need to do is change the option to automatically insert the results as a data set in the project. This is extremely useful if part of your workflow includes navigating through
Using Server-Side filters requires defined prompts with default values in Information Map Studio. But it is extremely important to note that changes to the default values (or adding a default value) to the map while the related dashboard is in use can cause some issues. The documentation has this noted
As I mentioned yesterday, some users create portal applications to bypass a second authentication step from the Portal to a Stored Process (via a URL Display Portlet). New in SAS 9.2, there is a STPRun directive that allows you to just complete one single step (create a URL display portlet)
In 9.2, the right-mouse click functionality is not available by default. To switch back to this (which for STP developers in a DEV environment is essential to our productivity), SAS has provided the following note: http://support.sas.com/kb/39/292.html As you can see, out-of-the-box, all SAS STP developers will need to do is
In SAS 9.2, internal accounts can be created and utilized within the metadata and then do not require host (or domain) accounts defined elsewhere. By default, the sasadm@saspw is one such internal account. Unless you specifically declare an exception, the server-level policies for routine password resetting and locking (such as
SAS procedure SUMMARY is a quick method of converting your detail table to a fully summarized one. Included is a sample. The key option to set is the NWAY - this generates the lowest level of summary for use in the OLAP cube. Essentially - the class statement contains all
In the past couple months, this scenario has occurred twice. So thought I'd share a quick remedy ~ and save for my future reference when this occurs again :). In Star Schemas, there are sometimes occasions where the data quality isn't exactly perfect. And sometimes, for some users/companies, this is
OLAP Calculated Members need to be tested to ensure that the numbers are correct in various tools. What we recently found was that the member tested properly in the OLAP Studio View Cube but then in Web Report Studio, the measure wasn't correct. Essentially, it was calculating the custom measurement
In 9.2, OLAP Cubes can be updated incrementally. This is awesome, as you then don't have to worry about users locking your cube by closing the Web Report Studio window or leaving their EG session running. However, at the same time, this can cause the size of space an OLAP
In DI Studio 4.3, SAS offers a code importer utility that can assist with moving legacy SAS code into an enterprise DI environment. The importer uses PROC SCAPROC to analyze and translate the code into DI Studio components. There is also a neat utility to bring in code comments and
When upgrading from an existing 4.2 client install of SAS Add-in to MS Office, you are not prompted to enable the Outlook portion of the Add-in. As SAS points out in the KB Post http://support.sas.com/kb/40/272.html, there is a 'Switcher Utility' available in the client install. When running this, I would
I've written about this topic before, but find that more people are interested in how this works. Hoping to provide more detail below. Let me know if I missed anything! When using the 'GEO' dimension type in SAS OLAP Cubes, users will not see anything new unless the OLAP cube
In SAS 9.2, OLAP Member Level Security became that much easier to implement. From SAS Management Console, an administrator can navigate directly into the OLAP Cube Dimension, add a user, grant explicit 'Read' access and click a button to get a snazzy interface to add read or deny security. The
New in 4.3, Web Report Studio users can directly report on data from OLAP cubes and data tables without the previously required information map. However, by default advanced users can only access OLAP cubes and information maps. Allowing direct access to data tables requires a change to user roles (defined
