Connecting database schemas to libraries in the SAS^® metadata is a very important part of setting up a functional and useful environment for business users. This task can be quite difficult for the untrained administrator. This paper addresses the key configuration items that often go unnoticed but can make a big difference. Using the wrong options can lead to poor database performance or even to a total lockdown, depending on the number of connections to the database.

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For any SAS^® Platform Administrator, the challenge is to ensure the right jobs run for the right users with the right resources at the right time. Running on a grid-enabled SAS platform greatly assists this task, allowing prioritization of processes to ensure an optimal mix of critical batch processing and interactive user sessions. A key feature of SAS^® Grid Computing 9.4 is grid options sets, which make it even easier to manage options, resources, and queues. Grid options sets allow different user groups to run SAS applications on a common shared SAS Application Server Context (such as SASApp), but the applications are still tailored to suit the requirements of each application and user group. Offering much more than just queue selection, grid options sets in SAS Grid Computing 9.4 now allow SAS Platform Administrators to effectively have 'conditional queues,' 'conditional configuration options,' and 'conditional resource requirements,' all centrally located and managed within a single SAS Application Server Context. This paper examines the benefits of SAS Grid Computing processing, looks at some of the issues encountered in previous versions of SAS Grid Computing, and explains how these issues are managed more effectively on a SAS 9.4 platform, thanks to SAS grid options sets.

Report automation and scheduling are very hot topics in many corporate industries. Automating reports has many advantages, including reducing workload, eliminating repetitive tasks, generating accurate results, and offering better performance. In recent years SAS^® launched more powerful tools to present and share business analytics data. This paper illustrates the stepwise process of how to deploy and schedule reports on a server using SAS^® Management Console 9.4. Many of us know that the scheduling jobs can be done using Windows (as well as scheduling jobs at the server level) and it is important to note that the server-side scheduling has more advantages than scheduling jobs on Windows. The Windows scheduler invokes SAS programs on a local PC and these are more often subject to system crashes. The main advantage of scheduling on the server is that most jobs that are scheduled run using nighttime facilities when there is faster record retrieval and less load burden on database servers. Other advantages of scheduling on the server side are that all scheduled jobs are at one location and it is also easy to maintain and keep track of log files if any scheduled jobs fail to run. This paper includes an overview of the schedule manager in SAS Management Console 9.4, a description of system tools and their options, instructions for converting SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® point-and-click programs into a consolidated SAS program for deployment, and several other related topics.

Often SAS^® users within business units find themselves running wholly within a single production environment, where non-production environments are reserved for the technology support teams to roll out patches, maintenance releases, and so on. So what is available for business units to set up and manage their intra-platform business systems development life cycle (SDLC)? Another scenario is when a new platform is provisioned, but the business units are responsible for promoting their own content from the old to the new platform. How can this be done without platform administrator roles? This paper examines some typical issues facing business users trying to manage their SAS content, and it explores the capabilities of various SAS tools available to promote and manage metadata, mid-tier content, and SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® projects.

If, like the character from George Orwell's novel, you need to control what your users are doing and also need to report on it, then this is paper for you. Using a combination of resources available in SAS^® 9.4, any administrator can control what users are allowed to perform within SAS, and then can create comprehensive and customized reports detailing what was done. This paper discusses how metadata roles can be used to control users' capabilities. Particular attention is given to the user roles available to SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® and the SAS^® Add-in for Microsoft Office, as well as administrator roles available to the SAS^® Management Console. Best practices are discussed when it comes to the creation of these roles and how they should be applied to groups and users. The second part of this paper explores how to monitor SAS^® utilization through SAS^® Environment Manager. It investigates the data collected through its extended monitoring and how this can be harvested to create reports that can track sessions launched, procedures used, data accessed, and other purpose-built reports.This paper is for SAS Administrators who are responsible for the maintenance of systems, system architects that need to design new deployments, and users interested in an understanding of how to use SAS in a secure organization.

It is not uncommon to hear SAS^® administrators complain that their IT department and users just don't get it when it comes to metadata and security. For the administrator or user not familiar with SAS, understanding how SAS interacts with the operating system, the file system, external databases, and users can be confusing. This paper walks you through all the basic metadata relationships and how they are created on an installation of SAS^® Enterprise Office Analytics installation in a Windows environment. This guided tour unravels the mystery of how the host system, external databases, and SAS work together to give users what they need, while reliably enforcing the appropriate security.

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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of SAS^® metadata security for new or inexperienced SAS administrators. The focus of the discussion is on identifying the most common metadata security objects such as access control entries (ACEs), access control templates (ACTs), metadata folders, authentication domains, etc. and describing how these objects work together to secure the SAS environment. Based on a standard SAS^® Enterprise Office Analytics for Midsize Business installation in a Windows environment, this paper walks through a simple example of securing a metadata environment, which demonstrates how security is prioritized, the impact of each security layer, and how conflicts are resolved.

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