SAS Articles

Atomic level data

Data with the lowest level of granularity. Atomic level data sits in a data warehouse and is time variant (i.e., accurate as of some moment in time now passed).

Attribute

A property or characteristic of an application entity. For example, the attributes of an EMPLOYEE entity in a business application may be:
  • IDFirstname
  • Lastname
  • Job_Title
  • Email_ID
An attribute usually represents a column in a table in a relational database, or a field in a file.

Audit Trail

Recording of any changes made to specific data. Details can include date and time of change, how the change was detected, reason for the change and before-and-after data values.

Avoid Growing Pains: New Cube Update Features You Should Know About

ABSTRACT 

You may have heard about the new cube update feature coming in SAS® 9.2 but may not be sure of just what it
entails. Learn exactly what cube update is and how to get started with it. These "how-to's" will be discussed:
 

  • distinguishing between managed and in-place update 
  • adding new data as well as new hierarchical members 
  • updating existing member properties 
  • changing cube captions

INTRODUCTION

After a SAS® OLAP cube is created, it is possible to update the data for the cube without completely recreating it.

The SAS® 9.2 OLAP Server enables you to incrementally update SAS OLAP cubes. An incremental update involves  adding cell data and members to an existing SAS OLAP cube. Incremental updates of a cube are generally faster  than rebuilding the cube from the combined set of input data and update data.  
 
There are several decisions you must make before you create your cube that will make the incremental update  process run smoother. You will need to decide how to structure your cube and the input data as well as choose a  method of update. The update procedure itself has many options that you can use to control what parts of the cube  will be updated. Once the cube is updated, there are maintenance tasks that you should perform periodically.  As you  update the cube, query performance may start to degrade.  This is due to the extra racks of data that are added  during the update.  One maintenance task is to coalesce the racks of data into a single aggregation table in order to
restore performance.

 Avoid Growing Pains: New Cube Update Features You Should Know About

Backing Up SAS Content In Your SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform

Every now and again SAS issues a whitepaper with recommended best practice for administering your SAS9 environment.

There is a great whitepaper over at SAS Support titled

Backing Up SAS Content In Your SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform
Considerations for Creating Backups of Your SAS Content

This document focuses on considerations for developing a content backup strategy for the SAS®9 Enterprise Intelligence Platform—including content from SAS Data Integration Server, SAS Enterprise BI Server, and analytic products such as SAS Enterprise Miner.

This paper is written for SAS system administrators who are responsible for maintaining the SAS environment and ensuring that service levels are met for your internal constituents. You should be familiar with the SAS®9 architecture and understand how content is generated and stored in your environment.

 

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Base SAS vs. SAS Data Integration Studio

This is a great paper that compares SAS Data Integration Studio against the requirements Kimball outlines all ETL environment should have.

Danny Grasse and Greg Nelson, SUGI 31, Paper 099-31

Abstract

Every data warehouse, data mart and data hut needs it. Every good business intelligence interface depends on it. It has been the hallmark of what SAS programmers have done for over 30 years –beat data into submission (a.k.a. ETL - extract, transform and load data). Now all grown up and ready to take on the world, SAS software’s ability to get at just about any data source, massage, cajole, beat, cleanse and transform information and then make it sing and dance in your tool of preference makes SAS the ideal choice for modern decision-support applications.

So which tools, technologies and/or approaches can we use for ETL and which make sense for any given
application? We will explore the world of ETL from the perspective of the tasks that we have to accomplish
and compare using Base SAS tools versus Data Integration Studio (or as it is now known – SAS Data
Integration Studio). To that end, we will highlight what a good ETL system should be able to do by taking a lesson from Ralph Kimball and his book and articles that outline the 38 subsystems for ETL. We will touch
on several key tasks found in ETL and show you how to accomplish these using both Base SAS and SAS Data Integration Studio. In addition, we will summarize the major capabilities of each approach as a quick
reference for management.

  Base SAS vs. SAS Data Integration Studio:

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Best Practices for SAS9 Metadata Administration

This paper is from a recognised expert wihtin SAS on all things SAS9 and provides high level recommendations (but with a far bit of detail to)on how to:

  • Organise the Metadata Trees
  • Structure Dev/Test/Prod 
  • Promotion and Replicaton
  • Metadata Security
  • Backup
  • Change Control

Diane Hatcher, Ken Matz, SAS Global Forum 2007, Paper 199-2007

Abstract

SAS®9 provides several tools to help with metadata administration, but you must implement internal processes to  optimize the usage of these tools. This paper provides some process best practices for backing up your repositories  and managing changes in the SAS®9 environment and discusses how you can leverage SAS®9` tools as an integral  part of the process. A brief overview of the road map for future enhancements is also given.

 Best Practices for SAS9 Metadata Administration
 

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Best Practices for SAS® Business Intelligence Administrators: Using the Configuration Troubleshooter

Best Practices for SAS® Business Intelligence Administrators: Using the Configuration Troubleshooter to Keep SAS Solutions and SAS BI Applications Running Smoothly

The SAS Metadata Server holds a wealth of information, including all the configuration settings for your environment.  There is a plugin within the SAS Management Console called 'Configuration Troubleshooter' that enables you to query these settings.  This paper outlines some examples on how you might use this plugin.

Tanya Kalich,, SAS Global Forum 2008, Paper 302-2008

Abstract 

There is a tool that will help pinpoint access problems, check that security has been implemented correctly, debug WebDAV configuration issues, monitor the health of the Web application server, and more for your SAS® Business Intelligence installation. It will even allow you to create checks of your own, comparing configuration files to standards that you define. This tool is the Configuration Troubleshooter, and it is invaluable for creating and maintaining a smooth-running BI environment. This presentation will teach you how to use the Configuration Troubleshooter for maintenance and troubleshooting. Using case studies collected from SAS Technical Support, we will step through the process of problem discovery, investigation, and resolution using this tool.

 Best Practices for SAS BI Administrators: Using SAS Configuration Troubleshooter to Keep SAS Soluti 

 

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Best Practices for Working with CDISC Metadata in the SAS Data Integration Server

Althougth this paper focusses on using DI Serverin a clincial nevironment, it has some great  recomended practises we could all use.

Michael Kilhullen, PharmaSUG 2007, Paper sa03

Abstract 

Over the past few years, SAS has demonstrated how the SAS® Metadata Server can be used to implement and manage CDISC metadata and facilitate a metadata driven approach to standardizing clinical data. In this paper, we examine best practices for using SAS® Data Integration Studio to execute and manage key CDISC concepts such as controlled terminology, value level metadata, normalization of data, importing and exporting XML documents, and producing the CRT-DDS.

Within the context of these topics, we will also examine considerations for setting up and managing study metadata, writing efficient transformation processes, leveraging metadata to answer key business questions, and effective use of change management.

 Best Practices for Working with CDISC Metadata in the SAS® Data Integration 

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Better SAS Programming Through Version Control

Tim Williams, SAS Global Forum 2007, Paper 006-2007 

This paper expands upon concepts introduced in the SUGI31 paper "Version Control on the Cheap. A User-Friendly, Cost-Effective Revision Control System for SAS." Several examples specific to the ConcurrentVersions System (CVS) are presented. Those concepts can be applied to other systems. The benefits ofversion control can be attained by individuals or scaled up to global programming teams.

The goal is not to review and compare various applications and methods, but to present general concepts
and provide specific examples from the experience gained using CVS on over three hundred SAS programming projects. With this information you will be well equipped to start research into which tools and methods are best suited to your own programming environment.

 Better SAS Programming Through Version Control 

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Bi Explorer

The BI Explorer provides a simple way for users to navigate the vast array of reports, data explorations, information maps and stored processes you have created.  Each report is listed in a simple to navigate tree structure.

BI Explorer Portlet

The BI Explorer provides a simple way for users to navigate the vast array of reports, data explorations, information maps and stored processes you ave created.  Each report is listed in a sinple to navigate tree structure.

View more about the BI Explorer Portlet

 

 

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BI Explorer Portlet

BI Explorer provides a simple way for users to navigate the vast array of reports, data explorations, information maps and stored processes you have created. Each report is listed in a simple to navigate tree structure.

  • View all report objects:
    • Web report viewer reports
    • Data explorations
    • Information maps
    • Stored processes
  • View by the BIP Tree structure
  • View in alphabetical order

USD $1,000 for unlimited users.

Read more...

Binary Search

A dichotomizing search with steps in which the sets of remaining items are partioned into two equal parts.

Bit Map

A specialized form of an index indicating the existence or non-existence of a condition for a group of blocks or records.
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Boost Your Programming Productivity with SAS Enterprise Guide

Chris Hemedinger, SUGI 30, Paper 019-30

Abstract 

SAS Enterprise Guide (with its easy-to-use interface) has been a boon to SAS users, especially non-programmers. However, SAS Enterprise Guide provides some powerful new features that are geared toward the SAS programmer, including an integrated process-flow view of your project; the ability to create, publish, and execute stored processes; and increased flexibility for output format and destination with the SAS Output Delivery System (ODS).

This paper provides an overview and detailed examples of how SAS programmers can leverage SAS Enterprise Guide to create, organize, and execute their SAS programs.

 Boost Your Programming Productivity with SAS Enterprise Guide 

Bus

The hardware connection that allows data to flow from one component to another.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is often seen as an oxymoron, and the term has so many definitions it is almost funny (almost).  Luckily the world of SAS users often present papers explaining what it is and how to do it and here are some of the papers they have written.

View SAS Forum Papers about Business Intelligence (Portal, Web Report Studio, OLAP etc)

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