Directory Services and Integration Technologies

The SAS implementation of directory services is based on LDAP Version 2. SAS Integration Technologies, Release 8.2 includes support for UTF-8 character encoding which means that you can use either an LDAP Version 2 or LDAP Version 3 server.

Integration Technologies software includes several facilities that can be used to add, modify, delete, and search entries in an LDAP server. These are

The LDAP CALL Routine Interface and the LDAP SCL Interface are application facilities that enable you to utilize an enterprise directory server from within a SAS application environment.

The Integration Technologies Administrator is a Java application that is used to manage the LDAP directory entries for objects that are used by components within the SAS Integration Technologies product.

All of these facilities interact with a directory server using either LDAP Version 2 or Version 3. SAS Integration Technologies supports the following directory servers that have been tested for use with the product:

iPlanet Directory Server
IBM eNetwork LDAP Directory Server
Microsoft Active Directory.

Active Directory is Microsoft’s implementation of directory services that runs on Windows 2000 Server platforms. While more than a generic LDAP server, it does support an LDAP interface through the Active Directory Service Interface (ADSI).

While commercial enterprise directory servers are currently recommended, SAS Institute acknowledges the LDAP open-source initiative and will make executables of the openLDAP slapd server generally available across a variety of platforms. If your site has not yet implemented an LDAP-enabled directory, contact your SAS account representative for deployment options.

SAS Application LDAP Structure

SAS application data begins at a sasContainer object with a relative distinguished name of cn=SAS, as shown in the following image. The user must provide the location of the relative distinguished name during the installation of the directory services portion of SAS Integration Technologies.

Below the cn=SAS container are containers for each SAS component that uses information from the LDAP directory. The following list provides a brief description of each container that is used in the SAS application sub tree.

sasPublishSubscribe: Holds entries with descriptive information about channels that are used to publish information to a list of subscribers. It also holds entries for each subscriber as well as the delivery mechanism for that subscriber and other preferences. This information is retrieved and used by the Publish Package Interface when a publish request is made.
sasServer: Holds definitions of IOM servers and spawners that are used to instantiate these servers, as well as logical names (optional) for the servers. These entries are used by distributed clients to find the information that is needed to establish a session with an IOM server. The spawner (objspawn) also utilizes this container to retrieve its configuration information during startup. These entries are created and managed by an administrator. For example, if a server becomes unavailable, the administrator can change the entry for the logical name of the server (if a logical name has been configured) so that it points to another server that can provide the same service.
Archiving: Holds information about result set packages (called packages) that have been published to the archive. This package metadata can be used to facilitate information retrieval as well as manage the life cycle of the packages.
sasMessaging: Used for entries that hold configuration information that is required to interface to message queues for the IBM MQ Series, Microsoft MSMQ, and the SAS common messaging interfaces.

Below the SAS component containers are containers for the entry types that are used by those components. For example, the cn=transports container holds entries that contain information about an available message queueing transport.