This is the first article in a series about improving the performance of SQL Server functions. Functions add overhead. They have many benefits, including flexibility and maintainability, but they come at a cost of reduced performance. This is a simple...

A few months back i was asked to visit a client’s site to improve the performance of an application. This usually wouldn't be an issue, but ..... I was hesitant to say yes. why? Because I knew getting the appropriate access and tools would take longer than the actual...

I've just attended Amazon's "Architecting for AWS" three day course and have walked away full of awe and wonderment at the possibilities that such a platform presents. For those who don't known AWS (Amazon Web Services) are a collection of services hosted around the...

Not a day goes by it seems when I don’t get an email from a vendor espousing the virtues of their analytical software, providing white papers on how others have benefited from their product. With so many pushing their wares how do you figure out which analytical...

Cloud computing has been a game changer in the technology space, organisations no longer need to provision their own data centres, maintain their own hardware, operating systems and levels of application infrastructure. Hosting all of these with a cloud provider does...

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...

Recently I was caught off guard by the idiosyncrasies of T-SQL's bit operations. Programmers accustomed to other languages will be a bit surprised by the absence of bitshift operators in T-SQL. Books Online has a less than helpful article on bitwise operators. The...

With all the hype surrounding ‘big data’ analytics - the magical promises of actionable insight, the glitz and glamour of data visualisation it’s easy to forget about what goes on behind the scenes to make it all happen - data preparation and exploration. These are...

Working with files that are larger than the available memory can be difficult on a windows system. Notepad, and similar editors, will not open files that will not fit in memory. Excel is a good choice, as it will only load the first million lines. So if those first...

Ok I managed to not put it in the title but it comes back to the old give a man a fish vs teach a man to fish concept. I have been struggling to work out what the best options are to impart knowledge to others in a way they can consume it, but more importantly in a...

There's been a lot of talk lately about SAS Visual Analytics. This is how typical report looks in SAS Visual Analytics 6.1: From the above report it looks like each report object (Pie, Bar and Drop down) sits within its respective reporting window, but how about if...

The Problem: Our database is setup to re-direct SAS connections to a database we don't have read/write access to. Is there a way you can change the schema name so that the library is assigned to the correct one? Solution: dbconinit libname option.    ...

As BI professionals we spend a lot of time making information visible through reports. One of the main technologies behind those reports is Structured Query Language (SQL). SQL is an industry standard that has come a long way since its beginnings in the 1980's. I've...

If you come across an error like this in your synchronisation log    ERROR: A Person named Shane Miles already exists in this server.  you may be able to delete the user from the server and rerun the process, or you may have to exclude the user from the load process....

“With one foot in a bucket of ice water, and one foot in a bucket of boiling water, you are, on the average, comfortable.” (Bobby Bragan, 1963) Human beings revel in their uniqueness and value their individuality, yet when it comes to data we become fixated on the...

Nodes Good practice in SAS generally is for everything to have a proper name. EG will name output tables from tasks with a generic ‘Query_for_query1’ style of name. This won’t do. All tasks and output datasets need proper names. I would suggest that tasks be named for...

What do I want you to get out of this blog? Well I want you to use EG to lay out SAS processes and tasks beautifully.   Imagine the best hotel room you ever stayed in, think of how it was the first moment you walked in, everything was in its place, everything was...