Did you know that applying a new SAS license file for many SAS solutions is a two step process?

Because many of SAS’ most of popular solutions (including SAS^® Visual Analytics, SAS^® Enterprise Miner^TM and SAS^® Customer Intelligence) depend on the middle-tier architecture for primary user access, information about licensed products and expiration information is maintained in metadata.  So to renew licensing properly for another year, SAS administrators need to update the SID file information in metadata in addition to updating the licensing information stored in the CORE catalog.

As SAS administrator, when you receive a new SID file, you must first apply the new license using either the Renew SAS Software utility on Windows or by running the sassetup script on UNIX systems.  This step updates the CORE catalog with licensed products and expiration dates, and it must be performed on every machine that has a Base SAS installation.

For sites that license SAS solutions, the SAS administrator then needs to run the SAS Deployment Manager and select the “Update SID File in Metadata” option.  This can be done from any machine in the deployment and only needs to be performed once, regardless of the number of machines involved.

You’ll be prompted for metadata connection credentials, the configuration directory, and the fully qualified path to the new SID file.  The SAS Deployment Manager takes care of the rest and the new licensing information will be updated in metadata.  All that’s left to do is to restart all of the SAS processes to pick up the new license.

For more information

Technical Support maintains a list of all SAS solutions that require this two step process in Usage Note 49750.

Similarly, there are detailed instructions for renewing all types of SAS installations available from support.sas.com.  You can search by Base SAS release, product and product release.