It’s All about the Data, Dummy!

Happy belated New Year! For what it’s worth, no, I am not calling you a “dummy” or writing this just for Chris Hemedinger– just wanted to get your attention. This blog is actually an introduction to a series that I am kicking off this year entitled: "It's all about the data…"

Whether you be “grey and grizzled” or new to this SAS stuff, sometimes it can be helpful to see how others think about things. In this series, I am going to cover a lot of ground, which is ultimately paramount to everything we do in SAS. I love reading what Wendy McHenry and the other bloggers write about SAS Metadata and could never compete with their metadata mind-share! Instead, I am going to focus on data, data, data! – none of this “data about data” stuff!

So this may be as boring as watching disks spin in a refrigerated data center, but I trust that you will keep me honest and alert with how you think about these things.

In this series, I will start with an overview of how SAS “eats” data and what SAS cares about (metaphorically speaking, of course). Here, we will cover the fundamentals of how SAS works across all data engines. We will follow this up with subsequent articles covering topics like:

Understanding SAS Libraries (Physical versus metadata, native versus database, security 101, I/O and system characteristics)

How SAS clients see data (understanding permissions, library references, pre-assigned libraries, metadata library options, batch versus interactive and details on the how DI Studio, Enterprise Guide, Web Report Studio see data as well as as best practice on managing library references)

Third-party database engines:

Oracle Libraries

SQL Server Libraries

ODBC

Testing and Debugging Connection Issues including benchmarking performance (and of course tuning)

Understanding database credentials (shared ids vs. dedicated)

Predicting Data Growth – Simple tools for estimating volumetrics and managing cleanup

File Systems Primer (types of storage, understanding raid, improving I/O, benchmarking your own performance)

Data Architecture for SAS Grid Manager

Hopefully you will find this interesting and challenge me with topics that will expand the list with the things that you care about most.

Until then, see you soon!

-greg

It’s All about the Data, Dummy! was published on SAS Users.