Contributed by Angela Hall, author of the Real Business Intelligence for Real Users' blog, an acclaimed blog for tips and tricks on SAS BI. Angela works for SAS Professional Services as a Technical Architect and holds a MBA with a Technology Management focus and a BA in Statistics. You can also follow her on Twitter.
In mid-November 2008 I added some Google Analytics functionality to Real Business Intelligence for Real Users' to track usage. It’s fun to see where people are landing from search engines or what they might have bookmarked for future use. Of course data is hardly complete (since tracking utilization data started 3 years after the blog birth and this doesn’t include RSS feed statistics), but it’s still interesting! Let’s take a look.
1. https://blogs.sas.com/content/bi/
The main page of the blog is the coolest place to read up on my latest SAS BI adventures and discoveries. Most blogs exist in reverse chronological order so readers get the latest updates and rarely head to years old information.
2. Free SAS Training Material
What can I say? It’s FREE! Since I wrote this blog post there have been almost 2000 views of this single page! This also lists other free stuff to help learn SAS (such as User Group Papers).
SAS Training also offers some wonderful training courses for BI users, which may not be free, but they certainly are a great value.
3. So How Do You Know What is Installed?
Tasked with managing a SAS Version 9 installation and would like a great mechanism to see what is installed? This is the source!
4. METALIB Update
Administrators can grant Write Metadata access to SAS Enterprise Guide users so that SAS Management Console isn’t the only mechanism to update data table structures within the metadata. Here is a code mechanism to do this in 9.1. And in 9.2 there is a cool new task – check the comment from Chris Hemedinger on that one!
The SAS Enterprise Guide Administration course and the SAS Platform Administration Fast Track course provided by SAS Training also cover this topic.
5. Creating a Distinct Count Value in SAS Information Map Studio
How about that for content diversity? In the top 5 blog posts, training, administration, and technical content are all included! This is the technical – how to get counts of qualitative values. It’s a simple solution but something that is needed for Web Report Studio users.
This topic is also covered in Creating Business Intelligence for Your Organization 1 and Creating Business Intelligence for Your Organization 2, or the Creating Business Intelligence for Your Organization Fast Track. All three of these courses are provided by SAS Training.
Knowing what is popular is half the answer (and an easy answer to obtain). This helps me understand where to further elaborate on my blog. The next piece is to find out what is missing. Is there anything that you cannot locate out there (whether within SAS documentation, SAS Technical Papers, SAS Training, SAS Global Forum Proceedings, Discussion Forums, SAS blogs, etc)?
