This blog is not about the original movie The More the Merrier (1943) or its remake, Walk, Don’t Run (1966), which I’ve actually seen a couple of times. It’s actually about the wide variety of descriptive statistics available in SAS Visual Analytics—and when you want to examine the characteristics of
Somebody once said that relationships are not easy. Well now they are—in SAS 9.4, at least! SAS objects have inherent relationships and dependencies, and a change to one element can often have an impact on one or many related objects. For example, for SAS Visual Analytics reports to work as
Does your week start on Sunday or Monday? Do you have a promotional product you would like to see at the top of your list? Do you have a particular order in which you like to view your regions? Custom sorting is now possible with SAS Visual Analytics 7.1. The
Many larger SAS deployments have multiple instances of similar SAS-related servers. For example, a distributed SAS Enterprise BI environment may have several machines running instances of the object spawner or the OLAP server. Similarly, all of your distributed SAS Visual Analytics deployments have worker nodes that are typically dedicated Linux
In the latest release of SAS Visual Analytics Designer, a parameter is a variable whose value can be changed and that can be referenced by other report objects. Why is this an important introduction? This addition means that, not only can you design interactive reports via prompt controls, those controls
Everyone is always looking for test data. Business analysts want it for demos and prototypes. Software developers want it for development and unit testing. Testers want it for system and integration testing. I’ve written many programs to generate test data over the years, as have many other SAS users. Generated
New Year to me is always a stark reminder of the inexorability of Time. In a day-to-day life, time is measured in small denominations - minutes, hours, days… But come New Year, and this inescapable creature – Time – makes its decisive leap – and in a single instant, we
This is the last of my series of posts on the NIST definition of cloud computing. As you can see from this Wikipedia definition, calling anything a “cloud” is likely to be the fuzziest way of describing it. In meteorology, a cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen
When designing a SAS Grid Manager architecture, there is a requirement that has always been a critical component: a clustered file system. Over the years, vendors have released versions of these systems that are more robust and SAS has increased the minimum IO requirements, but the basic design has never changed—until now.
As SAS administrators, I know you are as excited as I am by the ability of SAS Environment Manager to monitor, in detail, the performance of their SAS environments. Now, we have a robust tool to monitor, measure and report on the performance of the various SAS components. An added
In case you haven’t read about SAS Visual Statistics, let’s start with a quick overview. First, it’s an add-on to SAS Visual Analytics. Second, it’s a web-based solution with an interactive, drag-and-drop interface that helps you rapidly build descriptive and predictive models. Lastly, SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics
In a recent post, I talked about the 5 essential characteristics of cloud computing. In today’s post, I will cover the three service models available in the cloud as they are defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. Like the story of Goldilocks, when it comes
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
Several new capabilities and components are available in SAS Environment Manager 2.4, the web-based administration solution for a SAS environment. For me, the most important enhancement is probably the SAS Environment Manager Service Management Architecture Framework, which provides features and functions that enable SAS Environment Manager to fit into a
During a migration to a new release of SAS software, the SAS Migration Utility is used to analyze and package your source software. There are two ways that you can get the SAS Migration Utility. It’s available by selecting SAS Migration Utility from the Downloads page on support.sas.com. The SAS Migration
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 MinerTM and SAS® Customer Intelligence) depend on the middle-tier architecture for primary user access, information about licensed
If someone asks you whether SAS runs in the cloud, there are exactly two wrong answers: "yes" and "no". Instead, this question should spark a discussion. It should be a discussion about which of the five characteristics of cloud computing they are interested in. The answers will point you in
While previous SAS releases provided high availability through custom-designed failover techniques, many customers requested more robust failover or cluster support for high availability. The SAS 9.4 Metadata Server cluster was introduced to help address this need. A SAS Metadata Server cluster is a coordinated set of metadata servers that act
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
Report design includes several phases. Granted, these phases aren’t official: they’re more a reflection of my own thought processes and how my report designs typically unfold: the initial “get the data on the screen to see what we have” phase the addition of filters and prompts to assist with guided
A challenge for you – do a Google search for “Hadoop Security” and see what types of results you get. You’ll find a number of vendor-specific pages talking about a range of projects and products attempting to address the issue of Hadoop security. What you’ll soon learn is that security
Scalability is the key objective of high-performance software solutions. “Scaling out” is a concept which is accomplished by throwing more server machines at a solution so that multiple processes can run in dedicated environments concurrently. This blog post will briefly touch on several scalability concepts that affect SAS.
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
Great news. If you’ve been struggling to import a Twitter stream as a data source, SAS Visual Analytics 6.4 has greatly simplified that task as part of this release’s expanded data import functionality. The first time you import tweets, you are directed to the Twitter website to log on to
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
Most organizations enjoy a plethora of SAS user types—batch programmers and interactive users, power users and casual—and all variations in between. Each type of SAS user has its own needs and expectations, and it’s important that your SAS Grid Manager environment meets all their needs. One common solution to this
When new SAS users get introduced to the SAS Business Intelligence software (SAS BI), along with the thrill of a wide spectrum of new and desirable functionality, almost always comes a state of confusion – if not panic. How do we go about adapting it to our organization IT guidelines?
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
As I was preparing for a customer introduction to using SAS Enterprise Guide, I asked them to send me all the questions they had regarding the Enterprise Guide usage. It turned out that many of their questions can be answered with a single feature called an autoexec, or automatically executable
