Overview of Tasks for Providing Data

Task

Details

Acquire privileges.

Providing data involves interacting with your Windows operating system and your SAS resources. Before you can provide data, you must have certain privileges in each environment.

Make data available.

Your data is not directly used in reports and explorations. Instead, you load a copy of your data to memory in the server. In-memory data (in the form of LASR tables) is the only data source for reports and explorations. Here are the basic load methods:

import	point and click to create LASR tables from any supported type of data.
autoload	schedule a recurring process to create LASR tables from your spreadsheets, delimited files, and SAS data sets.

Keep data available.

A LASR table is an in-memory copy of your data, so data availability is interrupted if someone unloads a LASR table or stops the server. To keep data available, ensure that unloaded LASR tables are reloaded in a reasonable amount of time. Here are the reload methods:

manual reload	for tables that were imported from a server. After you point and click in SAS Visual Analytics Administrator, the data is available again.
reload-on-start	for tables that were imported as local files or from Facebook, Google Analytics, or Twitter. After the server restarts, the data is available again.
autoload	for tables that were autoloaded. After a specified time interval elapses, the data is available again. Autoload requires additional setup.

To reliably provide data, you manage the following cycle of data availability:

initial load → unload ⇄ reload

First, new data is made available through import or autoload. When LASR tables are unloaded (because the server stops or someone manually unloads a LASR table), the data is unavailable. After a manual or automatic reload, the data becomes available again. The unload-reload sequence occurs repeatedly.