Every time I install SAS products or solutions I find myself using the same options in the SAS configuration file to set memory usage, CPU usage, and the SAS WORK library location. Obviously each installation has different thresholds configured but the options remain the same. In some situations not having the …
The post SAS Administration: Change the Options to Get More Performance appeared first on Business Intelligence Notes for SAS® BI Users. Written by Steve Overton.
When troubleshooting data performance problems, IO problems, or simple library connectivity, I use a simple snippet of code to push the data storage to the limits. It is useful because it stresses the data storage component, whether it be a SAS dataset on local file storage or an external database like Oracle, and it provides useful performance metrics. To make it even better, since this is a SAS Macro it can easily be called multiple times for different libraries by setting the 2 parameters in the %BENCHMARK() macro. Data Benchmark Macro Code The following code will take the CLASS dataset from the SASHELP library and continually append a specified number of iterations. Be sure to include the OPTIONS statement to get the vital statistics in the log. [crayon-502242bf5ab3d/] Output This is the output produced when the FULLSTIMER option is set. These statistics were produced on my laptop with a solid state drive. NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time): real time 15.08 seconds user cpu time 13.55 seconds system cpu time 1.45 seconds memory 414561.92k OS Memory 439844.00k Timestamp 08/01/2012 11:00:11 PM How fast can you run this code? Remember to set […]
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 […]
SAS PROC SQL has a lot of neat ways you can extract and manipulate data. In my experience, SAS users typically write PROC SQL to query SAS datasets or relational tables in databases. You can also…
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Back in September, I shared performance help for SAS 9 users who run on Windows 2008. At that time, I promised more insights from Margaret Crevar. Your next installment has arrived! For all the SAS customers running on AIX (5, 6, or 7), please note…
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 […]
Configuring and tuning an environment is part luck and part science. Luckily, a group of employees at SAS dedicate their time to helping you improve system performance. Margaret Crevar is one of those people. She just recently shared several papers w…