As promised, this is a guest post by Steve Overton, who was one of the external reviewers on the Building Business Intelligence with SAS. Steve works as a SAS BI consultant in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area and is sharing some of his SAS OLAP Cube wizardry with us today! Building OLAP Cube Aggregations Effectively Let me start by saying that I follow a general practice of building cubes by writing the code directly in a SAS program rather than relying solely on SAS OLAP Cube Studio. Tip #1: Use SAS OLAP Cube Studio for Skeleton Code A good technique I’ve learned is to start building the cube in SAS OLAP Cube Studio to get the skeleton code written for you. Then proceed with additional dimensions, measures, and customizations by enhancing the SAS code directly. Once you have a few cubes built, it is also just as easy to copy the OLAP code from one program to the next! Tip #2: Use Separate Steps for OLAP Cube Aggregations Aggregations in OLAP cubes are used to improve the response time of a cube. By default, aggregations are defined along with the cube in one giant PROC OLAP step. One critical technique […]
Tag: Building Business Intelligence
SAS Info Map: Need leading zeros on the account number?
When creating new variables, the SAS Information Map Studio opens the entire SAS format library to you. These formats can be key to creating lots of new data items. SAS format control the way data items appear. In past articles I showed you how to create new data item using SAS functions and date formats. Check the SAS documentation to learn more about all the different formats available. Creating new Data Items in SAS Information Map Studio When data has been merged from various companies, such as when one company acquires another one, their data may be in different formats. For instance, account numbers might vary from 8 characters in one company and 12 characters wide in the other. When this occurs one option is to use the widest account number and add zeros to the front of the smaller one to integrate the fields better. You can do this easily within the information map using the Z format. From SAS Information Map Studio, you can create or modify the existing variable. In this case I have two account numbers – 1 where there are only 3 characters and the other with 5 characters. The end result should be […]
SAS Enterprise Guide: Shielding your EG project from Hound Dogs
In the coming weeks, you’ll see more posts from Harsh Gajjar, who is SAS Business Intelligence (BI) and SAS Design Integration (DI) rising star in India. Today he is discussing how to keep nosy co-workers (lovingly referrer to as hound dogs) or when you want to ensure changes are not made by accident to your neat, sweet, and complete SAS Enterprise Guide projects. If you have some nagging DI questions, then send one of us an email or leave a comment below. Securing SAS Enterprise Guide Projects Every BI professional must be acquainted with the SAS Enterprise Guide Project. However here I’m going to discuss about the issues related to securing your process flow from unauthorized access. We are quite aware of the fact that the metadata security and permissions enable a user to restrict the access of data to specific people. (viz. SAS Admin ). However the metadata does not restrict a person from peeking into someone’s process flow or project to get some idea. Use Built-In Password Protection SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 has availed a facility to restrict the access to Project through password Protection. Click on project Properties-> Security and type the desired password. Another window appears to […]
SAS BI Prompts: Gettin’ User Friendly
When creating prompts in SAS Business Intelligence or SAS Enterprise Guide, the value the database or your code uses to populate the field may not be user-friendly. Certainly you want your user community to think you are that cool BI developer tucked…
SAS Info Map: Error Message Invalid Filter
Here’s a quick tip for today. But I’m hearing some rumors that a colleague (who is an SAS OLAP wizard) is planning to post some OLAP tips . If you have a topic idea – send me an email using the envelope icon at the bottom of the page …
Web Report Studio: Souped up Dashboard Speedometers, Sliders, and Dials
Sometimes SAS Web Report Studio needs some dashboard dials and sliders that seems like mission impossible for you. However, add a stored process with the trusty ole’ SAS GKPI procedure to bring the dashboard features to your local report. I know you are wondering – “What is this special magical procedure of which she speaks?” Oh you are about to find out my precious little SAS geeks. Adding Dashboard Goodies to SAS Web Report Studio You can easily add sliders, dials, and speedometers to your report using a stored process and the SAS GKPI procedure. In the following figure, the report contains a sample of the different gadgets you can add. Plus notice – there is not any data (cube, info map) being used – it’s all stored processes. Show me the Code! All of the code was based on the examples from the GKPI procedure SAS documentation. I’m only going to show how to create the one for the Avg Fix Response Time because there are just a few fine points to creating an registering the stored process. Otherwise, I basically used the examples from the SAS documentation and I think it’s easy enough to figure out. […]
SAS Enterprise Guide – Tips & Tricks for Editing a Data Table Directly
Some of you may not realize that you can edit the data tables directly in SAS Enterprise Guide. You can also delete, insert, and append rows to an existing table. Here’s some SAS Enterprise Guide tips for this simple magic. Get your scroll …
SAS Information Map Studio: Data items with same name
In SAS Information Map Studio, you may notice that some data items have similar names with a numeric after the name. When you use the data items from various tables they may use similar names. It can be difficult for the end user to understand what the…