A colleague asked for help with randomly choosing a kid within a family. This is for a trial in which families are recruited at well-child visits, but in each family only one of the children having a well-child visit that day can be in the study. The…
SAS OLAP Cubes: Automatically Collect ARM Performance Logs
Collecting ARM logs can be extremely useful when tuning OLAP cubes for faster response. The ARM log (which stands for Application Response Measurement) collects vital usage information for OLAP cubes using the SAS OLAP Server logging facility. SAS OLAP Cube studio can analyze these logs to assist with aggregation building to make OLAP cubes return faster results. Angela Hall discusses this and other ways to tune OLAP cubes in this post. SAS Support has excellent information on tuning OLAP cubes using ARM logs as well. Enable ARM Logging Interactively You can start collecting ARM logging by setting a value in SAS Management Console. By default the log is placed in the following location on the server: [SAS CONFIG]/Lev1/SASApp/OLAPServer/Logs Enable ARM Logging Automatically When developing OLAP cubes I use ARM logging to build key aggregations I find important during testing or to ensure the initial performance is acceptable for end users. Since a development environment can go up and down (especially on my own laptop ) I find myself continually going into SAS Management Console to enable ARM logging. Rather than going through this manual approach every time the OLAP server is restarted, I recommend enabling ARM logging by default in […]
Code wizards make the magic happen
Wizard Harry Potter makes magic just waving his wand around and shouting out spells. Using SAS Enterprise Guide (and you are welcome to shout out your own commands too) you can create some magic, allowing the Stored Process Wizard to code for you. On S…
And the difference between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics is …
After some discussion with SAS Product Marketing yesterday, we devised this response to everyone’s question about the Business Analytic differentiator that SAS provides. **********************************************************************************…
Read a Microsoft date-time value into a SAS date-time value
A colleague was recently working with a web service that supplies some date-time values using the Microsoft Windows internal representation. He called the web service to retrieve those values (along with other data) from SAS, and he needed convert these values to SAS date-time values. The Microsoft definition for a […]
Any SAS program can become a SAS Stored Process
Questions (or search strings) lead people to my blog or my email box on a daily basis and many of these are related to what SAS Stored Processes can or cannot do. Can a SAS Stored Process query an RDBMS? Can a SAS Stored Process create a data table? Co…