Blogs

Blogs

SAS Administrators

Stay informed on the best ways to manage SAS programs and installations

SAS Administrators

Christina HarveyAugust 21, 2013 0

SAS 9.4 metadata cluster: what and why?

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

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SAS Administrators

Wendy McHenryAugust 14, 2013 0

Four ways to schedule SAS tasks

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

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SAS Administrators

Christina HarveyAugust 7, 2013 0

Updated deployment tool for SAS hot fixes

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

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SAS Administrators

Margaret CrevarJuly 31, 2013 0

Tuning SAS performance in a virtual environment

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

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SAS Administrators

Amy PetersJuly 24, 2013 0

Capturing the number of logins per SAS user

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

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SAS Administrators

Christina HarveyJuly 17, 2013 0

Guide to SAS user IDs and password rules

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

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SAS Administrators | SAS Events

Amy PetersJuly 10, 2013 0

SAS Environment Manager: The buzz around SAS 9.4

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

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SAS Administrators

Edoardo RivaJuly 3, 2013 0

Help, I lost my SAS server again!

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,

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SAS Administrators

Margaret CrevarJune 26, 2013 0

When should I use solid-state storage for SAS?

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

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SAS Administrators

Gregory NelsonJune 19, 2013 0

How to connect to SAS libraries when the client application isn't metadata-aware

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

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SAS Administrators

Edoardo RivaJune 14, 2013 0

Help, I lost my SAS server!

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

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SAS Administrators

Christina HarveyJune 5, 2013 0

Don’t overlook release management

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

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SAS Administrators

Christina HarveyMay 30, 2013 0

Securing SAS installations--some recent papers

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

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SAS Administrators

Christina HarveyMay 22, 2013 0

SAS administrator connections and resources

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

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SAS Administrators

Gregory NelsonMay 15, 2013 0

Pre-assign SAS libraries? If so, which method?

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

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SAS Administrators | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsMay 8, 2013 0

Taking business intelligence mobile

In today's fast-paced, jam-packed work day, many people answer email and read reports after business hours. And more and more, they're doing those things on a smartphone or tablet. How are your users accessing and using your reports? Statistics South Africa has found that their end-users would prefer a mobile

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SAS Administrators | SAS Events

Christina HarveyApril 17, 2013 0

SAS Global Forum: Focus on SAS administration

If you're a SAS administrator and haven't registered or planned your agenda for SAS Global Forum 2013, here are a few key happenings to tempt you!

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SAS Administrators

Wendy McHenryApril 10, 2013 0

Hiring a SAS administrator? 12 questions to ask

I have been on both sides of the table during an interview to hire a SAS administrator. I’ve been hired as a SAS administrator, and I have hired SAS administrators. Today, I work with SAS customers to help them find the best software for their business needs. I get asked-

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SAS Administrators

Margaret CrevarApril 3, 2013 0

Planning for SAS use on solid state drives

SAS software benefits from the high performance of solid state drives (SSD), whether it is in the form of flash memory cards or hard-drive form-factor SSDs. The following general points should be considered when planning SSD storage for SAS usage:

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SAS Administrators

Simon WilliamsMarch 27, 2013 0

Finding audit bliss in SAS Web Report Studio

For many organizations, having traceability for members of staff accessing and leveraging customer data is a key requirement. There is the obvious security focus when leadership teams think about traceability, but there are additional uses for audit data within the organization: Using it to identify potentially broken work practices and

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SAS Administrators

Tricia AanderudMarch 20, 2013 0

Establishing a SAS publication channel

You can create SAS publication channels based on topics (3rd Quarter Results), organization (Business Unit X), user audience (new product release), or any other category. Once defined, authorized users can subscribe to the channels and automatically receive information whenever it is published.

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SAS Administrators

Margaret CrevarMarch 13, 2013 0

Improving SAS performance on an IBM POWER7 system

One of the roles my team enjoys is working with SAS customers on performance issues along with testing SAS software on selected hardware configurations. We also work closely with other groups within SAS who work with SAS partners to test the latest and greatest features. My team then takes what

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SAS Administrators

Gregory NelsonMarch 6, 2013 0

Seeing SAS data through metadata

Last time we discussed the fundamentals of SAS data and how we reference that data in SAS Foundation. Now, we will turn our attention to how you access and protect data when you want to expose data through SAS clients versus the traditional LIBNAME method.

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SAS Administrators

Margaret CrevarFebruary 27, 2013 0

Improving performance: Determine the cause

Thanks for reading my previous post about the importance of understanding your performance issues before trying to determine the cause. Compiling all the available information about the problem and finding a repeatable SAS process that can be monitored are the first steps toward fixing the issue. Since we now have

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SAS Administrators

Gregory NelsonFebruary 20, 2013 0

Data by any other name

So let’s get down to it, what exactly do we mean by data in SAS? We hear all about “big data”, tiny data, datasets, metadata, OLAP, relational data, but what do I really need to know when it comes to SAS?

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SAS Administrators

Wendy McHenryFebruary 13, 2013 0

Registering DBMS data in SAS Management Console

I am a big fan of SAS Management Console. This is the central location where you can perform many of your SAS administration tasks. One of the most important tasks of a SAS Administrator is making sure data is available to the right people when they need it. Most of

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SAS Administrators

Jennifer ParksFebruary 6, 2013 0

Two methods for editing SAS metadata

The SAS Metadata Server holds all of the metadata for a given SAS EBI installation. For most SAS administrators, the sole view into the Metadata Server is through SAS Management Console. This is a very limited perspective out of the box, as much of the metadata is not surfaced by

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SAS Administrators

Paul HomesJanuary 30, 2013 0

Protecting your metadata protections

I think most people would agree that there's not much point in locking your front door if you're going to leave the keys in the lock. With a SAS platform metadata security implementation, it is just as important to ensure that the metadata access controls that you have carefully put

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SAS Administrators

Margaret CrevarJanuary 23, 2013 0

Improving performance: Understand the problem

My team and I are often called on to help customers optimize SAS system performance, particularly when the root cause of performance problems is hard to track down. This is the first of a two-part article on practices and tools we’ve found most useful.

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SAS Administrators

Gregory NelsonJanuary 16, 2013 0

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…"

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