What's New

What's New in SAS 9.2 Metadata Model: Reference

The SAS 9.2 Metadata Model has been enhanced to make it easier to create and manage metadata definitions, to support new SAS Metadata Server functionality described in What's New in the SAS 9.2 Open Metadata Interface, and to improve the modeling of properties, cubes, transformations, prompts, and other application resources. Several metadata types were also deprecated.

General Enhancements

Specific changes and enhancements are as follows:

The Root metadata type has a new attribute named UsageVersion=.
The SAS Metadata Model has two new abstract metadata types, PrimaryType and SecondaryType, which categorize the 9.2 SAS namespace metadata types.
A new metadata type, TypeDefinition, describes members of a SAS type dictionary. TypeDefinition and the SAS type dictionary are reserved for internal use in SAS 9.2.
Several enhancements were made for modeling identities:
- The ResponsibleParty association, Responsibilities, has moved from the Person metadata type to its supertype, Identity, to support defining responsibilities for a Person or IdentityGroup. The Role= attribute, which supports a string up to 100 characters, specifies what the responsibility is.
- The Identity metadata type has a new AssociatedHomeFolder association to the Tree metadata type to support user home folders. Conversely, the Tree metadata type has a new AssociatedIdentity association to the Identity metadata type to support user home folders.
- A DisplayName= attribute was added to the Person and IdentityGroup metadata types. DisplayName= specifies the name of the person or group as it should be displayed in client graphical user interfaces.
- A new metadata type, InternalLogin, enables support for internal user authentication. InternalLogin has a ForIdentity association to a Person or IdentityGroup. Conversely, Person and IdentityGroup have an InternalLoginInfo association to InternalLogin.
The RepositoryBase metadata type was modified:
- It has a new attribute named RepositoryFormat=.
- The Access= attribute supports the new values OMS_ADMIN (2) and OMS_OFFLINE (4).
- The AuditPath=, AuditType=, AuditEngine=, and AuditOptions= attributes are no longer supported. Client requests to store values for these attributes with the AddMetadata or UpdateMetadata method are ignored.
- The Engine= attribute no longer supports the values ORACLE and DB2.
- The DependencyUses and DependencyUsedBy associations are no longer supported. It is no longer necessary to create an association between two repositories to create cross-repository references between the objects in the repositories.
New attributes and associations in the Property metadata type affect how properties are modeled:
- The OwningType association in Property is now optional. Instead of creating an OwningType association to a PropertyType object, which contains information about a property's data type, application developers can store the SQL data type directly with the Property object in the SQLType= attribute. SQLType= has a default value of INT 12, which is the SQL integer value for VARCHAR.
- The PropertySet metadata type has a new attribute named PropertySetName=.
Several enhancements were made for modeling cubes:
- Four new metadata types are available for modeling the components of a cube, including CalculatedMeasure, GlobalFormula, HierarchyLevel, and SharedDimension.
- NextGeneration and PreviousGeneration associations were added to the Cube metadata type to enable references to be created to more recent or previous versions of the cube.
Several enhancements were made for modeling transformations:
- Three new metadata types were added to the Transformation submodel: Action, Condition, and ConditionActionSet store information about conditions that must be met before a set of actions can be performed.
- The cardinality of the TransformationActivity metadata type's Steps association has changed. The cardinality changed from 1..n to 0..n.
- The cardinalities of the StepPrecedence metadata type's Predecessors and Successors associations have changed from 1..n to 0..n.
New metadata types AbstractPrompt, Prompt, and PromptGroup support a new SAS Prompt Interface.
The cardinality of the ITSubscriber metadata type's SubscriberEmail and ProfileOwner associations have changed. The SubscriberEmail association changed from 0..1 to 0..*, allowing an email to belong to more than one ITSubscriber. The ProfileOwner association changed from 1..1 to 0..1 to make the association to a Person optional.
The ITFilter metadata type no longer requires a FilterSubscriber association to be defined to an ITSubscriber.
The Directory metadata type has a new attribute and a new association. The new attribute, DirectoryRole=, specifies the context in which the directory is used. The new association, Dimensions, references SharedDimension objects that are defined in the directory.
A new AnalyticContext metadata type references a location that has SAS analytic content. An associated server context should be a SAS server that can reference this location and interpret the content.
The IsURL= and Value= attributes of the LocalizedResource metadata type were modified. IsURL= is a Boolean value instead of a string value. Value= can store either the localized value of the property or a URL that points to the localized value.
The following modifications were made to the Change metadata type. The Change metadata type is updated by the change management subsystem:
- The cardinality of the Objects association has changed from 0..n to 1..n to force deletion of the Change object if there are no more associated objects.
- The cardinality of the ChangeIdentity association has changed from 1..1 to 0..1 to prevent the Change object from being deleted when the identity is deleted. Identity information is now stored in the Change object.
The URI= attribute on the Document metadata type was modified to support more than 256 characters. The URI= attribute is no longer a required attribute for some usages. For example, a public note does not require a URI value.
The Password= attribute on the Login and SASPassword metadata types has a maximum length of 128 characters.
The MiningResult metadata type has two new attributes: ModelKey= and SourceCodeKey=. ModelKey= is the universal unique identifier (UUID) or name of the model that is used to score the table. SourceCodeKey= stores "DATA STEP" for DATA step fragment code, or "SAS PROGRAM" for SAS program code.
The length of the TCPIPConnection metadata type's Service= attribute has changed from 32 to 128 characters.
The cardinality of key associations has changed:
- The Key metadata type's KeyColumn association changed from 1..n to 0..n.
- The KeyAssociation metadata type's ForeignKeyColumn and UniqueColumn associations changed from 1..n to 0..n.
- The ForeignKey metadata type's PartnerUniqueKey association changed from 1..n to 0..n.
The default value of the Column metadata type's IsNullable= attribute has been changed from "0" (do not allow missing values) to "1" (support missing values).
The SoftwareComponent metadata type has new DependentComponents and DependsOnComponents associations for storing information about product dependencies.
The AggregateAssociation, EMModel, EMRules, ITMap, ITModel, ITmsmqModel, ITQueueAlias, ITRendModel, ITTransportAlias, PSGridLayoutComponent and SummaryStats metadata types were removed from the SAS 9.2 Metadata Model.