SAS/ASSIST Software

New Facility for Defining Your Own Metadata

You can now define and prepare metadata to be used by all or a selected group of SAS/ASSIST users. This significantly speeds up the process of preparing data information at the beginning of a session, enabling users to get straight to the task at hand.

When a user starts SAS/ASSIST, the program examines all available data. If users have access to very large volumes of data on remote hosts, this can take considerable time, and would in addition have to be performed for each user. With the new facility for predefining metadata, this problem no longer exists. An administrator creates metadata in one central task, using a metadata-generation program--for example, as a batch job in an off-peak period. This metadata is then distributed so that it is immediately available to users when they start their sessions.

The metadata-generation program can also be customized to present information about only a subset of all available data. You can build this logic into an SQL program that retrieves information about data in the database. (Sample metadata-generation programs are provided with SAS/ASSIST.)

For example, an administrator can specify that only information about tables that have a certain attribute or name prefix is made available to certain groups. Thus, a single metadata-generation process can produce differentiated metadata output. This means that an employee in the finance department views predefined metadata relating only to tables that are relevant for that department, whereas an employee in the personnel department sees a different set of metadata.

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