Software performance is a complex topic. The answer to every question depends—depends on hardware, depends on operating system, architecture, time of day, number of users and so on. (Margaret Crevar gave us some insight into that complexity in her January 2013 post Improving performance: Understand the problem.) That’s why we
Welcome to the SAS administrator blog series for 2014! Back in early 2013, the most popular posts on the SAS Users Groups blog were all about the roles and responsibilites of SAS administrators. I was reminded of them during a presentation at WUSS 2013 in Las Vegas. Carey Smoak of
In November, I resumed the “it’s all about the data” series, laying a foundation for helping SAS administrators understand how SAS stores and manages data for use in business intelligence and analytic applications. For this article, I culled our internal Thotwave knowledge base and queried our consultants who get questions
This is a continuing topic of the SAS Administration and Performance blog series. In the last edition, I discussed why you need to do a technical assessment prior to planning your SAS deployment. Yes, this step takes time, but you’ll find it far easier to implement the suggested tuning guidelines
If you’re not an expert on encryption, have no fear! SAS 9.4 has introduced ways to bring stronger encryption to your SAS deployment. The good news is that SAS/SECURE is now a part of Base SAS when you upgrade to SAS 9.4 and is not a separately licensed product anymore.
Wow did the summer fly by! Now that grad school is over, it’s about time to resume the “it’s all about the data” series. In the last several posts, I tried to lay a foundation for understanding how SAS stores and manages data for use in business intelligence and analytic
SAS 9.4 has been out for some time now, and all SAS grid computing enthusiasts know that one of the new features is that SAS Workspace Server processes can be directly launched on the grid. (See The Top Four User-Requested Grid Features Delivered with SAS® Grid Manager 9.4.) What does
In SAS Grid Manager environments, SAS administrators must often set up separate configurations based on a mix of requirements for departments, client applications and user roles. To accomplish this in previous SAS releases, administrators must define multiple SAS Application Server contexts, each with its own grid server definition and associated options.
"Do I really need a detailed technical architecture before I start my SAS Deployment?" My team gets asked these questions all the time: Do we really need to spend the time for the above exercise? Why can’t we just start doing the deployment of SAS and fix issues if they come
Recently I delivered a SAS Talks session: SAS 9.4: What’s New for SAS® Administrators . We had a large group attend and subsequently had a wonderful flood of questions that we couldn’t always keep up with. So I wanted to follow up with some of the popular questions:
Do your SAS programs read extra-large volumes of data? Do they run multiple DATA steps and procedures one after the other for hours at a time? Two papers from MWSUG 2013 show how you can speed up those long-running SAS jobs. Although their approaches and environments differed, both authors made
My family are all Lord of the Rings Trilogy fans. As a novice in the world of SAS administration, I find discussing the SAS middle tier architecture a little like traveling through Middle Earth. For me, it’s new and fascinating terrain. And like other travelers, I would find it useful
Please register and join SAS Product Manager Amy Peters on September 26 at 1:00 pm ET for a SAS Talks webinar: SAS 9.4: What's New for SAS Administrators. This SAS Talks webinar is laser-focused on enhancements and changes that will interest SAS administrators. Specifically, Amy will highlight how the new
Some handy folks at SAS got together and created a series of videos to help you get started with the SAS 9.4 installation. It starts with the basics that explain what you should do with your Software Order Email. Step two provides videos for creating or moving the software depot.
With the popularity of SAS Grid Manager, this question often comes up: which clustered or shared file system should we use with the multiple nodes of the SAS Grid? This is a question that needs to be thought through very carefully because the amount of time and effort to fix
Over the past few releases, SAS has offered high availability for servers through various failover techniques. So I’ve been wondering how metadata clustering differs and why does SAS 9.4 provide it. The “why” is an easy question to answer. Today’s SAS software is used in a wide array of business-critical applications
What do you do all day long? I spend my time speaking with customers about what’s new in SAS 9.4, answering technical questions, and showing new users what they can do in SAS. You might spend your time on SAS data management tasks such as bringing in data and joining
An updated version of the SAS Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SASHFADD) has just been released on the SAS Technical Support Hot Fix site. If you are not familiar with SASHFADD (pronounced SAS-H-F-ADD), it’s a tool that will analyze a SAS 9.2, SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.4 deployment
Users often ask if there are any major tuning efforts that need to be made in order for SAS to execute ideally in a virtual environment. The quick answer is "not really". The longer answer is “it helps to set up your virtual environment properly.” There are a few minor
Christina Harvey recently forwarded this question from SAS user Bob Wasicak to several administrators here at SAS: “Does the metadata layer capture the number of login's per user? And how can I get at it? I have been using the metadata browser but would like to write a query to extract
I love tables. As a writer, there's nothing more satisfying to me than distilling complicated information into neat rows and columns. That's one of the features that caught my eye in SAS User ID and Password Usage Rules. The other is its potential usefulness for SAS administrators who manage SAS
I don’t think people typically think of administration as a fun thing, but it really was fun talking to SAS administrators at SAS Global Forum this year. There seemed to always be a crowd around the administration demo station. We had quite a few super demos and papers, and we
In my last post, I introduced the hardware solutions (such as a virtual IP switch or IP load balancer) that enable client applications to access services regardless of whether they are running on a primary or a failover server in a grid-enabled environment configured with high availability. In this post,
This question comes up often when we’re working with SAS customers to configure their underlying storage arrays: “When is solid-state storage appropriate for SAS applications?” Solid-state drives, or SSDs, are the latest and greatest thing in storage today because they boast extremely fast performance. In this post, I’ll outline how
Based on my previous posts, we are almost done with the basics of SAS libraries and how the various clients can access them. Before we leave this topic and go onto third-party database engines, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about some best practices for making sure that
Like most SAS users and administrators, you usually don't know where your backend SAS servers are located--probably in some basement server farm or perhaps another building or even another town. But I'm sure you do know that your SAS client application must have a way to reach services running on
John Heaton is no stranger to the often frustrating process of migrating code between environments after software updates. While release management and version control may often be afterthoughts, Heaton cautions that ignoring them could be “time consuming and disastrous should errors occur.” His winning SAS Global Forum paper SAS® Release
Reading Jan Bigalke’s SAS Global Forum paper on “Hardening a SAS® Installation on a multi tier installation on Linux" reminded me of baking apple stack cake with my mother. Neither is a simple project. Both are time-consuming, and their success depends on how skillfully you handle each layer. Data security
A good chunk of the SAS year revolves around SAS Global Forum. Pre-conference, everyone is busy polishing presentations and planning meetings. Post-conference is the best—attendees come back to Cary with heads full of customer ideas to implement and notebooks full of contacts to follow up on. One user's request found its
As we have seen my previous post "Seeing SAS data through metadata", there is a fundamental difference between accessing a SAS library using a physical reference or a metadata reference to that library. By now, you should now be an expert on the nuances of physical references to SAS data
