My favorite Administration papers from SAS Global Forum 2020

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This article was originally published on boemskats.com.

While my job title may not show it any more, at heart I am still a SAS Administrator. I installed, configured, upgraded, and maintained SAS environments for years and loved (nearly) every minute of it¹.

I have been involved with SAS Global Forum for a number of years now and recently we've created a set of sample agendas for the different streams. We’ve had lots of great feedback about how they help attendees to navigate the incredible amount of content that is available at the conference.

While I absolutely love attending sessions at SAS Global Forum, one of the most amazing things about the conference (whether you attended or not) is the conference proceedings. Each session that you may have caught has a proceedings paper containing even more content than could have been shared in the presentation.

The on-going situation with COVID-19 means that SAS Global Forum 2020 became a virtual event this year and conference attendees didn’t get to see our curated list of sessions. However, the conference proceedings are still available! So, without further ado, below is the list of sessions that I loved the look of and was excited to share as the “picks” for the Administration stream at SAS Global Forum 2020:

• 4313 - How to Maintain Happy SAS® Viya Users - Margaret Crevar, SAS Institute (@MargaretC)  From her lab in a secret location somewhere in Cary, NC, Margaret and her team provide customers and partners with performance tips and techniques to keep SAS users happy.

• 4315 - SAS® Viya® 3.5 Kerberos Constrained Delegation: Putting the Dog on a Leash - Stuart Rogers, SAS Institute (@StuartRogers😞  Stuart is the authority on Kerberos and SAS and has been presenting on this topic since before I was born (probably).

• 4408 - Essential Performance Tips for SAS® Visual Analytics - Meera Venkataramani, SAS Institute: Meera’s name is synonymous with Visual Analytics. She has been writing papers and presenting about Visual Analytics (particularly VA administration) at SAS Global Forum since 2012 and this is another detailed, helpful guide about Visual Analytics performance ²

• 4597 - Behind the Front Door: Authentication Options with SAS® Viya® - Mike Roda, SAS Institute: When you install a new SAS environment one of the first documents many reach for is the SAS® Intelligence Platform: Security Administration Guide to help them configure external configuration options. This paper is a very helpful guide to the different authentication options available in SAS Viya 3.5.

• 4632 - Accelerating SAS® Using High-Performing File Systems on Amazon Web Services - Darryl Osborne, Amazon Web Services: SAS9 workloads are notoriously I/O intensive. Ensuring you’ve got adequate throughput to your storage is going to be one of the keys for a successful SAS cloud project. Darryl’s paper takes you through everything you need to know about doing this in AWS. You can also see Darryl’s session on YouTube.

• 4649 - Exploring DataOps in the Brave New World of Agile and Cloud Delivery - Shane Gibson, PitchBlack: (@ShaneGibson_OptimalBI)  Shane is a great speaker and I am always very keen to hear about how people are taking new concepts in managing data and platforms and applying them to SAS environments.

• 4662 - From Silos to Ecosystem: Evolution of Analytical Platforms at Elisa Corporation - Prasanna Pandian, Elisa Corporation & Jarno Lindqvist, SAS Institute (@jarno😞 My favorite sessions to attend at SAS Global Forum are the “cautionary tale” sessions where people share their real life experiences. Learning from other people’s mistakes before embarking on your own journey invariably saves you time and money. I’ve reach out to presenters from these types of papers on countless occasions.

• 4857 - Efficient Release Management with SAS® - Lars Tynelius, InfoTrek (@larstyne😞  People who have worked with me know that version control and release management is a passion of mine. This is a great paper by Lars to help users and administrators easily promote SAS assets through environments in an automated and highly configurable dynamic way. Music to my ears.

• 4947 - Evolve Your SAS® Administration Skills with SAS® Viya - Jack McGuire, Amadeus Software (@JackMcGuire😞  SAS Viya represents a very significant change from “traditional” SAS. In this paper Jack does a great job providing examples of common administration tasks in SAS Viya by relating them to the corresponding tasks in SAS9.

• 4981 - SAS® in the Azure Cloud with HDinsight and the Azure Data Lake - Andrew Williams, Vanquis Bank: I’ve known Andy for years and he’s an incredibly talented Administrator and Architect. This is a detailed, thoughtful, and useful guide for anyone who is thinking about taking advantage of everything that the Microsoft Azure cloud has to offer.

And that’s just a sample of the Administration stream from SAS Global Forum 2020! There are so many great sessions across all the different streams that you absolutely must checkout. Grab yourself your favorite hot drink and read a paper from the conference proceedings, or watch a presentation on the SAS Users YouTube channel.

1. If anyone has a positive SAS9 to SAS9 experience using the SAS Migration Utility I’m interested to hear your stories!

2. There’s a lovely reference in this paper to Boemska’s ESM. We’re delighted that Meera thinks so highly of our product and we’ve loved working with her and the team.

3. Speaking of Azure; if you are an Azure customer and you’re running analytic workload in the cloud you probably want to check out Boemska’s ESM which is available directly from the Azure Marketplace.