Release Notes for SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4M2
This file contains late-breaking notices and information regarding:
Additions for SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4
- The Model Server of SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 is written in
C++. It uses SAS/ACCESS Interface to Oracle, SAS/ACCESS Interface to PostgreSQL or SAS/ACCESS Interface to ODBC to make connections to external databases. This change requires you to
specify connection information again in data import/export wizards.
- SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 supports importing
and exporting model data from Microsoft Office applications. However, be aware that the Office applications have size restrictions that can
limit their usefulness for managing large amounts of data. The points below
list the limitations of which SAS is aware. Others might exist:
- Excel 97-2003 Workbook (*.XLS) does not allow more than 65536 rows or more
than 256 columns in a table/worksheet.
- Excel 2007 Workbook (*.XLSX) does not allow more than 1048576 rows or more
than 256 columns in a table/worksheet. The Microsoft support website mentions
that the column limit for *.XLSX is 16384 but SAS has only programmatically
created up to 256 columns.
- Microsoft Access supports a virtually unlimited number of rows, but it 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 its tables.
- The default configuration of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and
2012 allows SQL Server to consume all available RAM on your computer. This may
leave other processes "starved" for memory if other components are
also installed on the SQL Server machine. SAS suggests changing this setting so
that SQL Server does not consume more than 50% of the available RAM on a shared
machine and no more than 80% of the available RAM on a dedicated database
server. This setting can be changed in SQL Server Management Studio on the
"Memory" configuration page in the Properties for your
SQL Server instance.
- If you re-run the SAS Deployment Wizard to reconfigure an
existing SAS deployment or to install additional SAS software, you must re-run
the SAS Deployment Wizard with the "Custom" prompting level to ensure
that it properly recognizes and reconfigures all the web application servers
that are configured on that computer. In addition, you must restart the Object Spawner on SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server
after reconfiguration so that it can pick up the new values.
SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server - All Databases
- If you are planning to perform an in-place database migration from a
previous version of SAS Activity-Based Management, it is very
important that you back up your existing database before the migration.
- Starting from SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4, the
Middle-Tier server no longer launches long-running operations in a separate
process. With the exception of cube generation, the execution of all long-running
operations has been moved to the Model Server. However, the Middle-Tier server is
still responsible for initiating and managing the operations on the model
server.
- If you are installing SAS Cost and Profitability Management
along with any of the language packs, you must make sure that the locale of your
language pack, your operating system, your Adobe Acrobat Reader locale version
(if applicable), and your Base SAS language configuration (if applicable) are
compatible. Failure to do this might cause the SAS Cost and Profitability
Management import, export, and/or reporting mechanisms to incorrectly
handle locale-specific characters or to fail to operate entirely.
- When using SAS Cost and Profitability Management with the
SAS Metadata Server on non-English systems, the SASV9.CFG file that 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 might appear with default names, such as "_COL1_, _COL2_", causing subsequent operations, such as cube generation, to fail.
SAS
Cost and Profitability Management Server - Oracle Database
- 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 form "BIN$+==$0".
These tables are not used by SAS Cost and Profitability Management and are not
created by SAS Cost and Profitability Management. However, they might become very
large, as they contain enough data to roll back large database updates that are
made by SAS Cost and Profitability Management. To prevent this unnecessary use
of disk space on your database server, consider disabling this Oracle data recovery feature for an entire Oracle instance. Disabling the feature will not
impact SAS Cost and Profitability Management in any way.
- If you are using the Oracle 12c client on the Model Server to
make a connection to the Oracle server, you might see 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: a
missing file, oraodm12.dll, causes Oracle bulk loader to fail (Doc ID 1593348.1).
You can copy the missing DLL from the server
installation to the client, or you can obtain it from Oracle Support.
- 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 Client
- When 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
the file to be visible from the server. SAS has changed the way this import
process operates due to changes in Microsoft Office.
- Accounts with dimension intersections "No <Dimension1>
x No <Dimension2> x ... No <DimensionN>"
can be exported but cannot be imported.
- Deleting period and scenario data might take a long time
when there is a large amount of data to delete.
- Do not set the monitor display size to any setting higher than 96 DPI.
- Users of the Accessibility capabilities of SAS Cost and
Profitability Management often use the JAWS screen-reading program. A
known bug in JAWS causes 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.
Perform the following steps in order to push the data from SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4M2 to the SAS LASR Analytic Server successfully:
- SAS Cost and Profitability
Management Cube creator and Modeler groups should be a member of the SAS Visual
Analytics Data Administrators group.
- Add SAS Cost and Profitability Management Cube creator and Modeler groups on the folder /Products/SAS Cost and Profitability Management/VA Reports with the following permissions:
- ReadMetaData
- WriteMemberMetaData
- Read
- Write
- Delete
- 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."