Tag: SAS

Estimation (Effort and Duration) #2/2

Yesterday I spoke about the art of estimation. I highlighted how valuable it is to be able to plan and estimate. I also highlighted that estimation is about getting a number that is close enough for the purpose, not about being accurate.To get to the m…

Estimation (Effort and Duration) #1/2

Estimation: The art of approximating how much time or effort a task might take. I could write a book on the subject (yes, it’d probably be a very dull book!), it’s something that I’ve worked hard at over the years. It’s a very divisive subject: some pe…

Business Intelligence (BI) Evolution

I recently stumbled upon an interesting series of papers from IBM. There’re entitled Breaking Away With Business Analytics and Optimisation. The informative and deep-thinking series talks about the need for data and good analytical processes, but it al…

NOTE: Thoughts on Lineage

I got quite a lot of interested feedback on the BI Lineage post I made last week. My post highlighted a most informative article from Metacoda’s Paul Homes.

Paul himself commented on my post and offered an additional tip. Here’s what Paul said:

I agree it would be nice if BI developers could do their own scans without relying on unrestricted admins to do them ahead of time. This would be similar to how DI developers can do their own impact analysis for DI content in SAS Data Integration Studio. Ideally, as with DI, they could be done dynamically, without having to do a scan and have a BI Lineage custom repository to store them in.

In the meantime, one tip I’d suggest to make it easier for the BI developers, is that BI Lineage scans can also be scheduled. An unrestricted admin can schedule a scan, at a high level in the metadata tree, to be done every night for example.

A useful tip indeed. Thanks Paul.


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See an audiovisual recording on my SAS Global Forum 2013 paper Visual Techniques for Problem Solving and Debugging

2014, The Year of Personal Data

If 2013 was the year of wearable, personal devices then 2014 will be the year of personal data. In 2013 we saw a huge rise in popularity of wearable devices for measuring steps walked, distance travelled, pulse, calories consumed, and a lot more beside…

NOTE: Wrap-Up on Test Coverage and MCOVERAGE

I’ve spent this week describing the functionality and purpose of the MCOVERAGE system option introduced in SAS V9.3. Coverage testing is an important consideration for your testing strategy – it’s important to know how much of your code has been tested…