How to configure SAS to work with Alation

[eirigoyen]

Greetings,

We have been asked to configure our SAS environment to interact with Alation. I am new Admin and still learning the ropes. We are currently running SAS 9.4M5 on a Unix environment. Has anybody done this before? Any information is greatly appreciated.

Regards.

Enzo.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @eirigoyen,

to be honest, Alation seems to be quite a specific product. That will make hard to anyone to give you answers, maybe no one did.

Instead of going to specific, let us work with more generic questions, directed to the kind of integration you are looking for, such as:

- Integration regarding data? Do you expect to feed SAS with data from Alation, or the other way around? What kind of data can Alation receive, and provide to SAS? 

- Integration regarding application? Web application integration? Authentication/authorizations? Communications with REST APIs/ web services? What kind?

- Integration though services? What services and flavours? Ports? Security constraints?

Etc.

[eirigoyen]

@JuanS_OCS and @nhvdwalt, thank you for your replies!

We are told that Alation will need to get access to our Metadata. At this time we are scheduled to have a meeting with our business partners to go over in more detail as to what is really needed from SAS. Below is all the documentation from Alation regarding how to connect to SAS. As you can see there is not much detail, i will post next week after we have had our meeting, hopefully we will have more details.

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SAS

Configuring SAS in Alation

• To configure SAS in Alation, you will need the following information:
• Hostname or IP address of your server
• Port number

Service account with privileges listed below

Supported Versions

Contact Alation.

Preliminaries

Firewall Configuration:

• Open outbound TCP port 8591 to SAS Workspace server.

SAS Workspace Server should be installed on your SAS server and Alation should be able to

connect to the SAS Workspace Server.

Create Service Account

You'll need to create an account on the SAS Workspace Server that supports host

Authentication. Instructions on defining host authenticated users can be found here http://support.sas.com/rnd/itech/doc9/admin_oma/security/auth/security_impauthhost.html          

Metadata Extraction

You'll need to allocate the following libraries to the SAS WorkSpace Server using the SAS

Management Console. Instructions on allocation can be found here http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/emxndg/67980/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p15m68fofeq4imn1jms...           

Table Profiles

Same as Metadata Extraction.

QLI Setup

Not Supported

[nhvdwalt]

Thanks @eirigoyen , the picture is starting to form now.

I think it would probably be best to pause here and await the outcomes of your meeting. Based on the use case we could advise on some integration options.

[nhvdwalt]

Hi @eirigoyen

Fully agree with @JuanS_OCS, we really need some potential use cases to be able to advise.

Looking at the tool briefly, it seems like it can connect to many different data sources, similar to what SAS does with our range of SAS Access engines. Possibly you have data in SAS (SAS data sets or SAS SPDS) that your business users want to explore in Alation. In this case you could surface your data using the SAS ODBC drivers. This will require the installation of the SAS ODBC drivers on the Alation side with either SAS Share or SAS SPDS on the SAS end. Just an example ...