The report-ready SAS Environment Manager Data Mart has been an invaluable addition to SAS 9.4 for SAS administrators. The data mart tables are created and maintained by the SAS Environment Manager Service Architecture Framework and provide a source of data for out-of-the box reports as well as custom reports that any SAS administrator can easily create. As you can imagine, the size of the tables in the data mart can grow quite large over time so balancing the desired time span of reporting and the size of the tables on disk requires some thought. The good news: SAS 9.4 M4 has made that job even easier.

The Environment Manager Data Mart (EVDM) has always provided a configuration setting to determine how many days of resource records to keep in the data mart tables. You can see below that in a fresh SAS 9.4 M4 installation, the default setting for “Number of Days of Resource Records in Data Mart” is set to 60 days. This means that EVDM data records older than 60 days are deleted from tables whenever the data mart ETL process executes.

The space required to house the Environment Manager Data Mart is split across three primary areas.

• The ACM library tables contain system level information
• The APM library tables contain audit and performance data culled from SAS logs
• The KITS library tables contains miscellaneous tables created by data mart kits that collect specialty information about HTTP access, SAS data set access, and such.

Prior to SAS 9.4M4, the ACM and APM libraries duly archived data according to the “Number of Days of Resource Records in Data Mart” setting, but the KITS library did not. For most of the KITS tables this is not such a big deal but for some deployments, the HTTPACCESS table in the KITS library can grow quite large. For administrators who have enabled the VA feed for the Service Architecture Framework, the size of the HTTPACCESS table directly impacts the time it takes to autoload the results of each refresh of the data mart, as well as the amount of memory consumed by the LASR Server used for the Environment Manager Data Mart LASR library.

So what is the big change for SAS 9.4 M4?

The KITS library now respects the “Number of Days of Resource Records in Data Mart” setting and removes data older than the threshold.  If you are a SAS administrator, you can now forget about having to separately manage the KITS library which should simplify space management.

SAS administrators may need to adjust the “Number of Days of Resource Records in Data Mart” setting to strike a balance between the date range requirements for reporting and the amount of disk space they have available for storing the EVDM tables.  With SAS 9.4 M4, however, administrators can rest assured that all EVDM tables will self-manage according to their wishes.

More on the Service Architecture Framework.