So, with the simple introduction in Understanding Hadoop security, configuring Kerberos with Hadoop alone looks relatively straightforward. Your Hadoop environment sits in isolation within a separate, independent Kerberos realm with its own Kerberos Key Distribution Center. End users can happily type commands as they log into a machine hosting the
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.
The major benefit of 64-bit applications is that they no longer have the memory limitation imposed by their 32-bit predecessors. This is why many SAS customers are making the transition from 32-bit SAS to 64-bit SAS. The move to 64-bit SAS can be daunting at first sight. There are many
In a comment on last week’s blog asking SAS administrators: please submit your paper idea for SAS Global Forum 2015, Andrew Howell of ANJ Solutions asked if I had any statistics on which were the most popular SAS administrator papers for last year’s conference. He suggested the following nominations although
The SAS Global Forum 2015 Call for Papers opened the end of last month! I cannot believe it is time to start getting ready for the conference that will be in Dallas, TX on April 26-29, 2015. As part of the group from SAS who goes to the conference each
I spend a lot of time on support.sas.com looking for resources to share. The SAS Programmer’s Bookshelf is a handy reference that’s been around for a while, so I asked “Why not a SAS Administrator’s Bookshelf?” What would you include? It’s complicated, of course, because the SAS administrator’s role covers
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?
This blog is a continuation of an earlier blog entitled “To grid or not to grid?” In that blog, one of the reasons to say “yes to SAS Grid” is to see if you can gain some performance improvements from modifying your existing SAS processes by converting them to a
SAS administration and support can be a real challenge for some companies. It all has to do with not having the right resources and skills. Business analysts are often charged with maintaining SAS. They know data, but they don’t have the IT skills needed to properly support SAS. IT teams
Let’s be honest. When well planned, a SAS Grid Computing platform as the basis for a shared, highly available, high-performance analytics environment can pay for itself many times over. However, it is critical that your overall objectives and computing environment be well understood for you to achieve success with your
I can’t believe that it has been almost two months since SAS Global Forum in Washington DC! As always, I was reinvigorated and came back with even more ideas on how to improve the way that we do things, apply new lessons and try some things out – along with
I’ve recently had the opportunity to learn a little more about administering SAS Visual Analytics. The sessions introduced me to two new GUI interfaces that simplify the work for SAS administrators. In my last post, I shared how to load data into memory using the SAS Visual Data Builder. After
SAS administrators often ask for a utility that can detect orphaned SAS WORK and SAS Utility directories on their back-end SAS compute systems. These orphaned directories result when a SAS Enterprise Guide or any other SAS GUI application is terminated incorrectly, and the SAS session does not terminate properly. SAS
Many years ago I was a SAS administrator for both a UNIX server and a LINUX server. I had a lot of syntax memorized and a lot of commands at my fingertips. If I ever mis-typed a command, I’d have to try again. I remember writing plenty of batch scripts
When I worked for SAS Italy, I was considered an old SAS employee because I started with SAS 8, and I saw all SAS 9 innovations from the beginning. I can even remember using SAS 6.12 a couple of times! Then I moved to the US and I felt like
Solving the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 hinges on the finding the plane's black boxes, or flight data and cockpit voice recorder. An airplane’s black box is something we hope never has to be used, but when there’s a problem, we sure are glad that it’s there. The black
Recently, as I was driving in listening to National Public Radio (NPR), the topic of conversation was Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency (NSA), again. If you’ve been listening to any of this coverage, it seems the news media has a new catch word “metadata” that they are throwing
It was wonderful to see and talk with so many SAS Administrators at SAS Global Forum this year. If you’re like me, you may have finished the conference wondering why it wasn’t possible to be two places at once because there was so much terrific content that it was impossible
SAS is constantly evaluating new technologies for internal and customer experiences. Based on requests from many of our customers, SAS R&D engaged with Fusion-io® to do performance testing with Fusion-io® ION™ Accelerator and ioScale™ storage devices. Our testing goals for the testing included:
SAS administrators have a delicate balance to maintain. SAS users want to be happy and productive, and to be granted the freedom to use any techniques in their skill set to accomplish their work. But the Business (or Government or Research institution) wants their sensitive data to be protected, and
Are you one of the users who upgrades to the latest version of SAS as soon as it comes out? Or are you like some and wait to upgrade until you’re jumping several versions? We’ve talked in previous posts about the benefits of moving to SAS 9.4, so today I’m
SAS Global Forum starts for me in the fall of the prior year. This is when you submit your ideas for papers and then wait patiently for many months to learn if it was selected. I enjoy writing and presenting ideas, so here are my topics and what inspired them.
My journey to SAS Global Forum each year resembles a Gartner “Hype Cycle”. Every year, I leave the conference with a million ideas about how I can take what I’ve learned back into my own practice and think (foolishly) that I should write a paper on this or that. Then there
SAS Environment Manager 2.1 (which was released with SAS 9.4 M1), has new features to make it easier to manage your SAS environment. For example, it now supports metadata clusters, and it has an improved method for handling access to the application. But the biggest change is in metadata access.
Here in the SAS Performance Lab, we’re seeing more and more SAS sites moving their SAS® 9 application workloads to Windows Server 2012. Now that we’ve had sufficient time to gather feedback from early implementers of SAS on these systems, we thought you might want a recap of some of
Does your site have multiple people maintaining a single deployment of SAS? Is it important for them to maintain a clear audit trail of who is doing what exactly? Or do you need to update your SAS deployment using different userids? Let's take a look at some techniques to manage
In the movie, The Matrix: Reloaded, our heroes and the KeyMaker frantically navigated from world to world through a series of doors and locks trying to escape the villains. Fortunately for our heroes, the KeyMaker always had the right key on his ring, he just had to know what key
Starting with SAS 9.4, not only will SAS administrators see lots of processes running on your operating system supporting the various SAS servers (such as SAS Metadata server), you will also see two new processes that have a description of “agent” running. Agents are software processes responsible for tasks such
