When a user starts and runs code in a SAS session, a number of temporary folders and files are created in the SASWork and SASUtil locations.  If that session completed and exits normally these folders and files are removed, however some SAS sessions exit abnormally,...

The Planets and stars aligned; While visiting family near Wellington and our monthly team meeting was on the same week, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the SUNZ National conference held at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington. For this short post...

You may or may not have heard that SAS have recently released a product/platform called SAS Viya.  What is it and where can I find out more, well in this post I’ll try to answer these questions. What is SAS Viya? First here is one of the many announcements of SAS...

If you have read my post How to install Qlik Sense in AWS you would have seen I have had the chance to have a play with installing Qlik Sense on the AWS infrastructure.  Well I wanted to take it one step further by deploying the Qlik Sense server behind an AWS ELB...

Following on from my previous post AWS TIPS AND TRICKS: Automatically create a cron job at Instance creation I mentioned I was uploading files from S3 using the AWS cli tools S3 sync command and I thought I would share how. The concept When launching an EC2 instance I...

As mentioned in my previous blog AWS TIPS AND TRICKS: TIME ZONE I have had to do a few things I didn’t know how to do when setting up an EC2 Linux server and I thought I would share these learnings. How to automatically create a cron job at Instance creation. I needed...

I have mentioned in previous posts I am no way near an expert in OS’ especially Linux, although I have to use in some form or another on a regular basis. While attempting to configure one of our AWS Linux servers I needed to do a few things that I have not had to do...

Amazon Web Services have just turned 10 and they gave a present away. For about half of March, they made all of their QwikLabs free. What is a QwikLab you ask? Who better to answer than AWS themselves (Thanks, QwikLab FAQs) “A qwikLAB is an online learning environment...

Late last year I wrote a blog on how easy Qlik Sense was to install, but hinted there might be an even easier way. Well it appears that there is, especially if you are using AWS as your instance/server provider, and if you use the Qlik Deployment Console (QDC)....

Working at OptimalBI, I am asked to install and configure a number of products be it for production workloads or internal evaluations. Some of these products require days of configuration (according to the vendor) or at the other end of the spectrum require a single...

As mentioned in Shane Gibson’s blog, Trifacta = I can code! (and free data wrangling on your desktop), some of us at OptimalBI have had the pleasure of using Trifacta’s Desktop Data Wrangling tool. A little something from their website Data Wrangling to Simplify the...

Recently I was tasked to create a pipe delimited file from an Excel Spreadsheet, a simple task you would expect.  On first glance it was not as simple I thought. I use Excel 2010 and was expecting to be able to do something like ‘save as’ and select the file type ‘CSV...

I have been researching different ways that we can get data into AWS Redshift and found importing a CSV data into Redshift from AWS S3 is a very simple process. Get the CSV file into S3 -> Define the Target Table -> Import the file   Get the CSV file into...

So one of OptimalBI’s SAS administration service selling points is that all of our SAS admin’s are certified, which meant I needed to pull finger and sit the exam (Yay - I am now certified in SAS Platform Administration in SAS 9).  This got me thinking, what is the...

To me customer service is key for repeat business and referrals.  It is about what you do (and don’t do) for your customers. With our recent move to Auckland and building a house, we have experienced very good and very bad customer service and I thought I would share...

Ok, part two of a series on what I found interesting or thought will be useful from the ‘Architecting with AWS’ training. But  first it was pointed out to me not everyone knows what AWS is so to recap AWS or Amazon Web Services offers web services that make up a cloud...

Once again I have been fortunate to attend another course put on by AWS, this time it was the ‘Architecting with AWS’ Partner training which was recently held in Auckland.  My next couple of blogs will introduce some parts of the course I found interesting or that I...

In a previous life I was responsible for promoting new and modified SAS DIS jobs from Development through to our production environment. The usual process would consist of manually exporting the appropriate objects,  selecting the dependant object option then...