topic Re: ODS and SAS Enterprise Guide in ODS and Base Reporting

ODS and SAS Enterprise Guide

ander113 — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:15:59 GMT

I'm having an issue when connecting to ODSP using SAS Enterprise Guide. I'm pulling data through ODS (not a SAS server) and some of the tables will load and others, I suspect larger ones, will not loaded at all. I click on the tables (Banner tables) and it appears to be working, but spins and goes into not responding mode for over an hour and then returns an error that says the table does not exist and that I need to refresh. The odd thing is, it shows the table in the project tree, but nothing else. I spoke to someone at Ellucian and he said the problem may relate to SAS needing to create a temporary table and that this can be bypassed with a parameter. I'm in institutional research, so I'm not very technical. Can anyone help?

Re: ODS and SAS Enterprise Guide

Reeza — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 18:37:27 GMT

I think there may be some terminology confusion here.

ODS stands for Output Delivery System, are you perhaps referring to ODBC instead, which is used to connect to data base servers?

@ander113 wrote:

I'm having an issue when connecting to ODSP using SAS Enterprise Guide. I'm pulling data through ODS (not a SAS server) and some of the tables will load and others, I suspect larger ones, will not loaded at all. I click on the tables (Banner tables) and it appears to be working, but spins and goes into not responding mode for over an hour and then returns an error that says the table does not exist and that I need to refresh. The odd thing is, it shows the table in the project tree, but nothing else. I spoke to someone at Ellucian and he said the problem may relate to SAS needing to create a temporary table and that this can be bypassed with a parameter. I'm in institutional research, so I'm not very technical. Can anyone help?

Re: ODS and SAS Enterprise Guide

ander113 — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 19:31:31 GMT

Yes, it's the ODS connection. Sorry, I'm not at all technical. I access this by right click>open>ODBC. The data tables are not in a SAS library.

Re: ODS and SAS Enterprise Guide

ChrisHemedinger — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 12:30:24 GMT

When you access data from EG via the File->Open->ODBC menu, you're pulling data to SAS via your desktop client. For small tables that can work okay, but for large tables it's slow (and in some cases, not possible because of the size). The more efficient method is to access your data source in terms of the SAS server: using a SAS library that accesses the ODBC data source.

I understand you're not familiar with all of these terms/mechanisms. You might need to work with a colleague that has a little more experience with "SAS plumbing" to get this working properly. Here's a SAS note that provides a basic explanation of what's going on.