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 web application logs, <config folder>\Lev1\Web\Logs but nothing appeared amiss.

Then I pulled up the jBoss log (located at <jboss install directory>\\server\\SASServer1\\log\\server.log). (Here is a quick tip for you: Scrolling up never works, because you look at the last error rather than the root cause. So I moved to the top and scrolled down.) The first issue is included below and it points to a service on port 12031.

2011-08-20 21:40:20,971 INFO  [STDOUT] 2011-08-20 21:40:20,967 [main]ERROR [] com.sas.tkts.TKTSConnection - Unable to connect: The application could not log on to the server "xxxx:12031". No server is available at that port on that machine. 2011-08-20 21:40:20,997 WARN  [org.jboss.resource.connectionmanager.JBossManagedConnectionPool] Throwable while attempting to get a new connection: nullorg.jboss.resource.JBossResourceException: Could not create connection; - nested throwable: (java.sql.SQLException: Unable to connect: The application could not log on to the server "xxxx:12031". No server is available at that port on that machine. ) at ....

After some digging in my services window I found the new 9.3 Framework Data Server running on this port. (Note:I changed all the ports during my configuration since I also had SAS 9.2 running on the machine. The default port is actually 22031.)

So what is this new thing?

According to the What's New Documentation: "The new SAS Framework Data Server is the default location for middle-tier data such as alerts, comments, and workflows, as well as data for the SAS Content Server and SAS Service Parts Optimization. The server is provided as an alternative to using a third-party DBMS. (The server cannot be used as a general-purpose data store.)"

Since all my SAS services are set to Manual - to save me some performance for tasks that don't require BI development - this service was not started when I was booting stuff up on Saturday morning. Yes indeed folks, we have a new service dependency to keep in mind. Update your service start up and shut down scripts accordingly. (Examples of these scripts for a Windows 9.1.3 environment was available from my SAS Global Forum paper 179-2009. Updating for this version will not be difficult.)

Also, note that it needs to be backed up with everything else out there. More information is available in the SAS Documentation.