Above, Waynette, you said, "A broad view of "What makes a great administrator?" is good." I will respond first with some general remarks and then follow with some detail. If the SAS Admin can be an accomplished server admin (Windows or Unix/Linux) that is ideal. If the Admin can also have all possible related infrastructure technical knowledge and scripting skills (part of being "accomplished"), that is helpful. If the Admin can also be accomplished in the area of capacity planning and performance management, that is helpful. I could go on and on with a wish list. I say that some job postings are such that God could not qualify.

There are people who maintain that an IT expert professional with no knowledge of SAS can get the job done. That's probably true. It also depends on what is your definition of getting the job done. My experience with SOME non-SAS-knowledgeable IT experts is that their view of SAS, or any non-OS-infrastructure product, is that their job is to install it and apply patches when needed, but otherwise the users are on their own.

I'm not going to try to weigh in as to exactly what experience and/or which backgrounds the ideal SAS Admin should have. Let me instead just describe the real working life of one SAS Administrator. The SAS Admin had prior experience both in SAS application development and in IT infrastructure support (but not the infrastructure in use for this SAS server).

Below "develop tools" means develop them with SAS and, where needed, with SAS accessing or triggering something in the platform infrastructure. Buying some package inevitably means living with its limitations. If you can find a way to build your own, you get EXACTLY what YOU want.

For "those who are thinking of the position for themselves", here is what the job can be like, particularly if you have a bias for maximizing benefit to the SAS users--i.e., believe in attentive support of them and the environment, not simply creating and maintaining the SAS environment. The context is one where the SAS Admin was NOT the server OS administrator, but depended on IT personnel to handle some of what needs to be done. "SAS analytical database" was the collection of SAS data libraries used by analytics staff who were among the enterprise's users of the server.

What Can SAS Administration and Support Entail?

Platform-Oriented Support

- support the SAS BI server
- support the SAS software
- serve as the essential subject matter expert for IT personnel on all problems and matters involving the SAS server, including performance, tuning, troubleshooting, gathering and interpretation of diagnostics, and decisions about configuration
- coordinate the installation of upgrades, enhancements, and changes to SAS software
- perform testing and quality assurance for all upgrades, enhancements, and changes to SAS software, including new releases, hot fixes, and service packs
- perform SAS testing and SAS quality assurance for any upgrades, enhancements, and changes to non-SAS-software aspects of the hardware, software, and network that affected or involved the SAS server
- coordinate and monitor progress of testing by users and professional programmers
- schedule and coordinate all planned outages on the SAS server
- alert users affected by unplanned outages on the SAS server, notifying them if there is to be an emergency reboot, and keeping them informed as to status and progress during the outages
- review, evaluate, and select all SAS software fixes for relevance
- assist and serve as user liaison/educator for upgrades to SAS server and SAS client software service
- serve as liaison to SAS Institute on all aspects of the SAS software, licensing, and cost matters
- review and advise on annual renewal of licensing for SAS software portfolio
- serve as liaison and coordinator for all SAS-provided on-site training
- develop monitor to track who is using the SAS server, when, and with what impact on CPU and memory resources
- develop monitor with email alerts to notify users whenever their SAS process have consumed a threshold amount of CPU time, with follow-up alerts upon further consumption of each threshold increment, with email alert CC’s to himself as Server Administrator
- develop tools to capture, parse, and analyze SAS-related records from the Windows Event Log
- develop disk space usage reporting for permanent data, with emails to users of shared disks that reach or exceed a threshold
- develop monitor to detect old data not cleaned up from critical shared disk used for SAS work data sets, sending email alert to owning user, with CC to herself/himself as Server Administrator—if the shared disk fills up, an entire group of users is immediately denied
- perform disk space planning
- allocate disk space for applications and users support
- administer SAS BI server user access definition and controls
- design the BI server user groups and corresponding logical servers

User-Oriented Support

- support users of client tools SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office
- support professional programmer users of SAS in Batch
- develop, administer, and analyze results from surveys of SAS user satisfaction and SAS user needs
- organize and host internal SAS users meetings for user mutual education and networking
- provide internal SAS consulting for users on matters of “how to”, performance, or malfunction
- perform SAS training
- develop tools so that users can monitor, control, and audit their processing
- build and maintain custom macros for general and special use
- prepare, disseminate, and internally web-post documentation on SAS facilities and matters of interest
- design, create, and maintain a web-based User Documentation and Tools environment for guided and explained access to local documentation and resources, to tips & news, and to SAS information resources at support.sas.com and around the world
- provide web-based guidance to users so that they can get immediate telephone help from, or online-submit problems to, SAS Technical Support—as option when she/he is unavailable as first level of support

Data-Oriented Support

- support all SAS-server-hosted data, regardless of type
- define and administer Windows security to control access to SAS-server-hosted data
- develop the applications for routine scheduled downloads from Oracle to the SAS analytical database
- port outside vendor data (such as that of Acxiom) to the SAS analytical database—porting required rather complex manipulation of the raw input to support a maximally usable environment of SAS data sets, SAS format libraries for code-to-text translations, and SAS labels for data description; validate accuracy of load
- provide documentation, code samples, and assistance for users who access data from non-SAS sources (relational databases, external files, etc.)