A useful and often overlooked tool released with the SAS^® Business Intelligence suite to aid in ETL is SAS^® Data Integration Studio. This product gives users the ability to extract, transform, join, and load data from various database management systems (DBMSs), data marts, and other data stores by using a graphical interface and without having to code different credentials for each schema. It enables seamless promotion of code to a production system without the need to alter the code. And it is quite useful for deploying and scheduling jobs by using the schedule manager in SAS^® Management Console, because all code created by Data Integration Studio is optimized. Although this tool enables users to create code from scratch, one of its most useful capabilities is that it can take legacy SAS^® code and, with minimal alterations, have its data associations created and have all the properties of a job coded from scratch.

This workshop shows you how to create powerful interactive visualizations using SAS^® Stored Processes to deliver data to JavaScript objects. We construct some simple HTML to make a simple dashboard layout with a range of connected graphs and some static data. Then, we replace the static data with SAS Stored Processes that we build, which use the STREAM and JSON procedures in SAS^® 9.4 to deliver the data to the objects. You will see how easy it is to build a bespoke dashboard that resembles that in SAS^® Visual Analytics with only SAS Stored Processes and some basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS 3.

As SAS^® programmers, we often develop listings, graphs, and reports that need to be delivered frequently to our customers. We might decide to manually run the program every time we get a request, or we might easily schedule an automatic task to send a report at a specific date and time. Both scenarios have some disadvantages. If the report is manual, we have to find and run the program every time someone request an updated version of the output. It takes some time and it is not the most interesting part of the job. If we schedule an automatic task in Windows, we still sometimes get an email from the customers because they need the report immediately. That means that we have to find and run the program for them. This paper explains how we developed an on-demand report platform using SAS^® Enterprise Guide^®, SAS^® Web Application Server, and stored processes. We had developed many reports for different customer groups, and we were getting more and more emails from them asking for updated versions of their reports. We felt we were not using our time wisely and decided to create an infrastructure where users could easily run their programs through a web interface. The tool that we created enables SAS programmers to easily release on-demand web reports with minimum programming. It has web interfaces developed using stored processes for the administrative tasks, and it also automatically customizes the front end based on the user who connects to the website. One of the challenges of the project was that certain reports had to be available to a specific group of users only.

The SAS^® Deployment Backup and Recovery tool in the third maintenance release of SAS^® 9.4 helps SAS administrators to collectively take backups of important data artifacts in SAS deployments, which include SAS^® Metadata Server, SAS^® Content Server, SAS^® Web Infrastructure Platform Data Server, and physical data in the SAS configuration directory. The tool supports all types of deployments, from single-tier to multi-tier clustered heterogeneous host deployments. The new configuration options in the tool give administrators more control over the data that is being backed up, from the SAS tiers to the individual directory level. The new options allow administrators to filter out old log directories and to choose the databases to back up. This paper talks about not only how to use the configuration options but also how to mediate the effects that the SAS deployment configuration changes have on the backups and how to optimize the backups in terms of size and time.