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

  1. 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.
  2. 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:
  3. 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.
  4. 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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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

  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 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.
  2. 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.
  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 Client

  1. 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.
  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 there is a large amount of data to delete.
  4. Do not set the monitor display size to any setting higher than 96 DPI.
  5. 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.

Push to SAS LASR Analytic Server

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:

  1. SAS Cost and Profitability Management Cube creator and Modeler groups should be a member of the SAS Visual Analytics Data Administrators group.
  2. 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:

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."