What's New in Data Administration for the SAS 9.3 Intelligence Platform

Overview

This document focuses on the SAS Intelligence Platform and establishing connectivity to your data sources (and data targets). Information about third-party products that you need to install and the metadata objects that you need to create are also described. It also contains information about setting up shared access to SAS data and explains how using different data-access engines affects security.

Support for DataFlux Federation Server
Support for Hadoop through SAS/ACCESS Interface to Hadoop
Preproduction Server and Library Wizards for SAS LASR Analytic Server
New Library Pre-Assignment Options
New Wizard for Standardizing Column Metadata
SAS Data Surveyor for PeopleSoft

Support for DataFlux Federation Server

In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.3, the LIBNAME engine for DataFlux Federation Server is introduced. SAS Management Console is enhanced to provide wizards for registering DataFlux Federation Servers and DataFlux Federation Server libraries. The DataFlux Federation Server is a data server that provides scalable, threaded, multi-user, standards-based data access technology in order to process and seamlessly integrate data from multiple data sources. The server acts as a hub that provides clients with data by accessing, managing, and sharing SAS data as well as data from several third-party databases.

Support for Hadoop through SAS/ACCESS Interface to Hadoop

In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.3, SAS Management Console is enhanced to provide wizards for registering Hadoop Servers and libraries that access data in Hadoop through a Hive Server. Hadoop is an open-source technology for large data volume storage and processing. It provides scalability from a combination of high bandwidth, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and fault-tolerant distributed processing. SAS Data Management provides integration with Hadoop in three ways:

reading and writing data in HDFS
sending programs and managing execution of programs in Hadoop clusters
selecting transformations from a library that includes Pig, Hive, and MapReduce processing

This document focuses on registering the Hadoop server in metadata and then registering libraries that use Hive for reading and writing tables.

Preproduction Server and Library Wizards for SAS LASR Analytic Server

In the second maintenance release for SAS 9.3, SAS Management Console is enhanced to provide preproduction wizards for registering servers and libraries for SAS LASR Analytic Server. The preproduction wizards are identified in the following list:

SAS LASR Analytic Server

This wizard is used to identify the connection information for a server instance and register it in metadata.
SAS LASR Analytic Server Library

This wizard is used to register tables that are loaded in memory on a SAS LASR Analytic Server instance.
SAS Data in HDFS Library

This wizard is used to register libraries for tables that are stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The library only works with SASHDAT files that are created with the OLIPHANT procedure or with the SAS Data in HDFS Engine.

New Library Pre-Assignment Options

Libraries can be pre-assigned so that the engine that is used for data access is controlled by the SAS administrator. For SAS 9.3, three options are used to identify how the library is pre-assigned. The options are to use the native engine that is identified in metadata, to use the metadata engine, or to indicate that an external configuration file has the LIBNAME statement for the library. These pre-assignment options help administrators control how the SAS clients access the data.

New Wizard for Standardizing Column Metadata

In some cases, table columns that have the same name and that are used for the same purpose should also have the same attribute values. For example, two columns named Total Sales should perhaps have the same data type and column length. The Column Standardization wizard finds columns that have similar names and compares their attributes. It shows any inconsistency in the column attribute values. You can use this wizard to generate a report about column differences or to log updates for audit purposes. You can also use the wizard to update the metadata for a table.

SAS Data Surveyor for PeopleSoft

In the SAS 9.3 release, the SAS Data Surveyor for PeopleSoft is no longer available. The SAS Data Surveyor for PeopleSoft continues to be supported on SAS 9.2 systems.