In the initial release of SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office 6.1 (revision 13w26), there was no support for clustered metadata servers. Support for clustered metadata servers in SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office become available in the 6.1 maintenance 1 release.

Configuring a connection profile to connect to a clustered metadata server environment follows the same process as configuring a non-clustered connection profile. Users initially specify one node (any node) in the cluster in their connection profile. When the connection profile is set to Active in the connection profile list of SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, the following occurs:

• A connection is made to the specified node which will retrieve all the nodes (hosts and ports) currently active and defined within the cluster.
• The connection profile is updated to include all the nodes within the cluster. Each nodes will appear space-delimited in the host field of the profile.
• When the connection profile is used, a connection attempt is made to the first node in the list. If one node is not available, an attempt to connect to the next node in the list is made until a connection is made. If a connection is not made to any nodes within the list, an error will be produced indicating that a connection to the metadata server failed.
• Once a connection is established, the node again retrieves the active/defined nodes in the cluster and updates the profile host field entries if necessary.

SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office do support fail-over for initial connections. However, SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office do NOT currently support complete active fail-over. Meaning, some level of SAS metadata server session failover does exist.

Users won’t lose their running job if metadata fails over so long as they don’t pull the plug on SAS Enterprise Guide.  Here is an example of something that works fine:

SAS Enterprise Guide is connected to a workspace server, it’s got a job running, metadata failover occurs (spawner not affected) SAS Enterprise Guide doesn’t lose its connection to the WS, that’s a direct client/server socket that has nothing to do with the metadata server (assuming the sas code is not metadata aware) …. workspace server job continues to run fine as long as the SAS Enterprise Guide client stays connected, SAS Enterprise Guide will post results for the user in the GUI, e.g. an output data set.

Another  example, if the user has an open stored process in their SAS Enterprise Guide session which has prompts, that had been executed, this stored process module would have a copy of the metadata connection information, if then the fail over and reconnect happens, that SP module is not notified and its connection info is not updated.  Attempts to simply re-execute the already open  stored process would get an error.  However, a simple “Refresh” of metadata folders fixes this.

Full support for active fail-over metadata cluster connections is not currently available. A fix is planned for a future software release.

Operating System and Release Information