Release Notes for SAS® Cost and Profitability Management 8.4

This file contains late-breaking notices regarding:

Additions for SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4

1.     The Model Server of SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 is written in C++. It uses SAS/ACCESS to Oracle, SAS/ACCESS to PostgreSQL, or SAS/ACCESS to ODBC to make connections to external databases. This change requires you to specify connection information again on data import/export wizards.

2.     SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 supports importing and exporting model data from Microsoft Office applications. However, users should be aware that the Office applications have size restrictions that may limit their usefulness for managing large amounts of data. The points below list the limitations of which SAS is aware, although others may exist:

1) Excel 97-2003 Workbook (*.XLS) does not allow more than 65536 rows or more than 256 columns in a table or worksheet.
2) Excel 2007 Workbook (*.XLSX) does not allow more than 1048576 rows or more than 256 columns in a table or worksheet. The Microsoft support web site mentions that the column limit for *.XLSX is 16384, but SAS has only created up to 256 columns by default.
3) Access supports a virtually unlimited number of rows but only allows 255 columns in an Access database table. In addition, an Access table is limited to 1 GB of storage, and an Access database (*.MDB) is limited to 2 GB of storage for all of its tables.

3.     The default configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and 2012 allows SQL Server to consume all available RAM on the local computer. This behavior can leave other processes "starved" for memory if other components are also installed on the SQL Server machine. You might want to change this setting so that SQL Server does not consume more than 50% of the available RAM on a shared computer, and no more than 80% of the available RAM on a dedicated database computer. This setting can be changed in SQL Server Management Studio on the Memory configuration page in the Properties dialog box for your SQL Server instance.

4.     If you run the SAS Deployment Wizard again to reconfigure an existing SAS deployment or to install additional SAS software, you must run the SAS Deployment Wizard with the "Custom" prompting level to ensure that it recognizes and reconfigures all of the web application servers that are installed on that computer. In addition, you must restart the Object Spawner on SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server after reconfiguration so that it can select new values.

SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server - All Databases

1.     If you are planning to perform an in-place database migration from a previous version of the SAS Activity-Based Management solution, it is important to back up your existing database.

2.     With SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4, the mid-tier server no longer launches long-running operations in a separate process. Except for cube generation, the execution of all long-running operations is now performed on the Model Server. However, the mid-tier server is still responsible for initiating and managing the operations on the Model Server.

3.     If you are installing SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 and any of the language packs, you must make sure that the locale of your language pack, your operating system, and your Adobe Acrobat Reader are compatible with your Base SAS language configuration (if applicable). A locale incompatibility might cause the SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 import, export, and reporting mechanisms to incorrectly handle locale-specific characters or to fail to operate entirely.

4.     When using SAS Cost and Profitability Management with SAS Metadata Server on non-English systems, the SASV9.CFG file, which is typically located in "C:\Program Files\SASHome\SASFoundation\9.4\nls\langcode" (where langcode is the language code for your installation) must have a line added of the form "validvarname=any". This addition is necessary to ensure that the column names in registered tables appear with correctly localized text. If this option is not added to the .CFG file, column names may appear with default names such as _COL1_, _COL2_, etc., which causes subsequent operations, such as cube generation, to fail.

SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server - Oracle Database

1.     Oracle 11g has a new feature that enables data recovery after queries. This is accomplished by creating "dummy" tables in your Oracle schema that hold the necessary information to roll back changes. These tables have names of the following form:
"BIN$+HQXPwmySkCtpdSzeQKKgA==$0". They are neither used by nor created by SAS Cost and Profitability Management. However, they may become very large, as they contain enough data to roll back large database updates that were made by made by SAS Cost and Profitability Management. To prevent this unnecessary usage of disk space on your database server, you can disable this Oracle data recovery feature for an entire Oracle instance. Disabling the feature will not impact SAS Cost and Profitability Management in any way.

2.     If you are using the Oracle 12c client on the Model Server to make a connection to the Oracle server, you may encounter the following error at the time of cube generation:

The cube cannot be made because the input data set does not contain any logical observations

There is a known bug in Oracle 12c client software installation, which is missing ORANFSODM12.DLL or ORAODM12.dll. These missing DLLs cause Oracle bulk loader to fail (Doc ID 1593348.1, Doc ID 1936068.1). You can copy these DLLs from the server installation to client or obtain them from Oracle Support. It is also observed that some installations may have only ORAODM12.dll. If you rename this file as ORANFSODM12.DLL then this issue is resolved, as described here: https://community.oracle.com/thread/3652577

3.     A known issue with Oracle’s JDBC driver version 12.0.1.2 is described here:  https://community.oracle.com/thread/3682300

You might encounter a “maximum open cursors exceeded” error with that driver. The workaround is to use version 12.0.1.1 or 11.1.0.7.0 or another version that does not have this issue.

SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server - PostgreSQL Database

1.     A PostgreSQL database will perform more slowly on large models than either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases. This happens because PostgreSQL does not have an external "bulk load" interface that is optimized for loading large amounts of data.

SAS Cost and Profitability Management Client

1.     When you are importing data from a Microsoft Access database or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, the file must be visible and accessible from the client. Previous versions of SAS Cost and Profitability Management required that the file be visible from the server. However, SAS has changed the way this import process operates to accommodate changes in Microsoft's support strategy for the Office Suite.

2.     Accounts with dimension intersections No <Dimension1> x No <Dimension2> x ... No <DimensionN> can be exported but cannot be imported.

3.     Deleting period and scenario data might take a long time when a large amount of data must be deleted.

4.     Do not set the monitor display font size to anything larger than 96 DPI.

5.     Users of the Accessibility capabilities of SAS Cost and Profitability Management often use the JAWS screen-reading program. There is a known bug in JAWS causing it to occasionally lock input fields of HTML pages, preventing users from entering data. If this happens while you are using JAWS, press Alt+N to re-enable screen input.

6.     If an end user who is using the IWA login launches a long-running operation, SAS recommends that the user not close the client while the long-running operation is in progress. The operation might fail if the client is closed.

Push to LASR

The following steps are required in order to push the data successfully to SAS LASR Analytic Server from SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4.

1.     SAS Cost and Profitability Management Cube creator and Modeler groups should be members of the Visual Analytics Data Administrators group.

2.     Add SAS Cost and Profitability Management Cube creator and Modeler groups to the folder /Products/SAS Visual Analytics Administrator with the following permissions:

1. ReadMetaData

2. WriteMemberMetaData

3. Read

4. Write

5. Delete

6. Create

If any of the above permissions are not granted successfully, the Regenerate Fact and Cube operation fails with the following message: "ERROR: Metadata Server denied access to operation."