Release Notes for SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4M3

This file contains late-breaking notices regarding the following:

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 connection 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 SAS is aware of. Others might exist:
    • Excel Workbook (*.XLS) does not allow more than 65536 rows or more than 256 columns in a table/worksheet.
    • Excel Workbook (*.XLSX) does not allow more than 1048576 rows or more than 256 columns in a table/worksheet. The Microsoft Support website mentions that the column limit for *.XLSX is 16384, but SAS has only programmatically created up to 256 columns.
    • Microsoft Access supports a virtually unlimited number of rows, but it only allows 255 columns in an Access database table. In addition, an Access table is limited to 1 GB of storage, and an Access database (*.MDB) is limited to 2 GB of storage for all tables.
  3. The default configuration of Microsoft SQL Server allows SQL Server to consume all available RAM on your machine. This situation might 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 machine. This setting can be changed in SQL Server Management Studio. Navigate to the Memory configuration page and locate 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 at the "Custom" prompting level to ensure that it properly recognizes and reconfigures all the web application servers that are configured on that machine. In addition, you must restart the Object Spawner on SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server after reconfiguration so that it can select 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 the SAS Activity-Based Management solution, it is very important that you back up your existing database before starting the migration.
  2. Starting with SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4, the Mid-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 Mid-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 8.4 and any of the Language Packs, 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 verify compatibility might cause the SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4 import, export, 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, which 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 may appear with default names such as _COL1_, _COL2_, etc. In turn, this causes subsequent operations such as cube generation to fail.

SAS Cost and Profitability Management Server - Oracle Database

  1. Oracle 11g has a new feature that allows recovering data 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$+HQXPwmySkCtpdSzeQKKgA==$0". These tables are not used by SAS Cost and Profitability Management and are not created by SAS Cost and Profitability Management. However, they can become very large, as they contain enough data to roll back large database updates made by SAS Cost and Profitability Management.

    To prevent this unnecessary consumption of disk space on your database server, this Oracle data recovery feature can be disabled for an entire Oracle instance. Disabling the feature will not impact SAS Cost and Profitability Management in any way.
  2. If you are using Oracle 12c client on the Model Server to make a connection to Oracle server, you might encounter 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, which is missing oraodm12.dll. Lack of this 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 obtain it from Oracle Support.
  3. A known issue with Oracle's JDBC driver version 12.0.1.2 is described in this Oracle community post.

    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 that the file be visible from the server. SAS has changed the way this import process operates due to changes in Microsoft's support strategy for 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 require a long time when there is a large amount of data to delete.
  4. Do not set the monitor display font size to anything higher than 96 DPI.
  5. Users of the Accessibility capabilities of SAS Cost and Profitability Management often use the JAWS screen-reading program. There is a known bug in JAWS causing 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 LASR

The following steps must be performed in order to push the data to the SAS LASR Server successfully from SAS Cost and Profitability Management 8.4M3:

  1. SAS Cost and Profitability Management Cube creator and Modeler groups should be a member of Visual Analytics Data Administrators group.
  2. Add SAS Cost and Profitability Management Cube creator and Modeler groups on the /Products/SAS Cost and Profitability Management/VA Reports directory with the following permissions:
    • ReadMetaData
    • WriteMemberMetaData
    • Read
    • Write
    • Delete
    • Create

    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."