Using SAS 9 Inventory to Validate an Upgrade or Migration
One of the most challenging and time consuming aspects to an upgrade or migration project is validating the post-upgrade environment. One of the first concerns of an administrator is to ensure that all of the content from the source environment made it to the target environment. In the past, this concern has given rise to innumerable bespoke programs to comb through metadata looking for changes. This post will show how an administrator can use the SAS 9 Inventory to compare contents before an upgrade to contents after an upgrade to identify differences in content.
SAS 9 Inventory is part of the SAS 9 Content Assessment which is a freely available collection of applications designed to examine the characteristics of a SAS 9 system. While this post will use only the SAS 9 Inventory, you can view Ajmal Farzam's demonstration video of the complete set of SAS 9 Content Assessment applications on YouTube.
The feature of SAS 9 Inventory that makes it quite useful for validation purposes is being able to
- Run the Inventory multiple times
- Label the result sets for differentiation
- Filter results in the SAS 9 Inventory report to compare two or more result sets.
For this post, I am going to use SAS 9 Inventory to identify content differences after an upgrade-in-place from SAS 9.4 M5 to SAS 9.4 M7. But bear in mind that this same technique could be used just as easily to validate a migration or promotion project.
The workflow for this exercise is to
- Run SAS 9 Inventory on the source environment
- Perform the upgrade-in-place
- Run SAS 9 Inventory on the post-upgrade environment
- Use SAS 9 Publish Assessment to merge and publish results to SAS Visual Analytics
- Compare contents using the SAS 9 Inventory report to spot differences.
Run SAS 9 Inventory on the Source Environment
After downloading SAS 9 Content Assessment to the source environment, I had to edit metaparms.sas and setenv.yaml before running SAS 9 Inventory. Notice that in metaparms.sas I am using the METADATALABEL to label the results in the datamart as "PreUIP".
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I then ran SAS 9 Inventory which connected to the SAS Metadata Server and searched for contents in the source system. Looking in the datamart directory below the SAS 9 Content Assessment installation directory, I can see that the results of SAS 9 Inventory are stored in ./datamart/inventory/PreUIP.
[sas@sasserver datamart]$ ls -alFR .: total 12 drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 14 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ../ drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 inventory/ ./inventory: total 12 drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ../ drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 PreUIP/ ./inventory/PreUIP: total 5156 drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ../ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 4063232 Nov 30 10:43 all_objects.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 655360 Nov 30 10:43 deploymentinfo.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 917504 Nov 30 10:43 licenseinfo.sas7bdat
Perform the Upgrade
The next step is to upgrade the deployment to SAS 9.4 M7.
Run SAS 9 Inventory on the Post-upgrade Environment
Even though I am using the same machine and the SAS 9 Content Assessment configuration I used earlier would still work, I need to modify metaparms.sas to make sure my next run of SAS 9 Inventory is labeled differently. In this case, I have changed the METADATALABEL to PostUIP to separate the results from the previous run.
After running SAS 9 Inventory against the post-upgrade environment, I now see that the SAS 9 Content Assessment datamart directory contains a second collection of result tables in ./datamart/inventory/PostUIP.
[sas@sasserver datamart]$ ls -alFR .: total 12 drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 14 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 ../ drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 inventory/ ./inventory: total 16 drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ../ drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 PostUIP/ drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 PreUIP/ ./inventory/PostUIP: total 4612 drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 ../ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 4194304 Nov 30 16:59 all_objects.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 655360 Nov 30 16:59 deploymentinfo.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 229376 Nov 30 16:59 licenseinfo.sas7bdat ./inventory/PreUIP: total 5156 drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 ../ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 4063232 Nov 30 10:43 all_objects.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 655360 Nov 30 10:43 deploymentinfo.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 917504 Nov 30 10:43 licenseinfo.sas7bdat
Use SAS 9 Publish Assessment to merge and publish results to SAS Visual Analytics
The next step is to run SAS 9 Publish Assessment which is another application in SAS 9 Content Assessment that will
- Merge the results from PreUIP and PostUIP into one set of tables
- Import the SAS 9 Inventory report into my post-upgrade environment
- Load the merged results into the LASR Server.
./publishAssessment --datamart-type inventory --va75
Re-examining the SAS 9 Content Assessment datamart directory after running the publishAssessment command, I can see new tables in the inventory directory which are the merged results from the PreUIP and PostUIP directories. These are the tables that are loaded into the LASR server for viewing in Visual Analytics.
[sas@sasserver assessmentTool]$ ls -alFR ./datamart ./datamart: total 12 drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 14 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 17:03 ../ drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 17:03 inventory/ ./datamart/inventory: total 10216 drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 17:03 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 3 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ../ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 7995392 Nov 30 17:03 all_objects.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 1310720 Nov 30 17:03 deploymentinfo.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 983040 Nov 30 17:03 licenseinfo.sas7bdat drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 PostUIP/ drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 PreUIP/ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 589824 Nov 30 17:03 sas_9_types_v5.sas7bdat ./datamart/inventory/PostUIP: total 4612 drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 16:59 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 17:03 ../ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 4194304 Nov 30 16:59 all_objects.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 655360 Nov 30 16:59 deploymentinfo.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 229376 Nov 30 16:59 licenseinfo.sas7bdat ./datamart/inventory/PreUIP: total 5156 drwxr-xr-x. 2 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 10:43 ./ drwxr-xr-x. 4 sas sas 4096 Nov 30 17:03 ../ -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 4063232 Nov 30 10:43 all_objects.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 655360 Nov 30 10:43 deploymentinfo.sas7bdat -rw-rw-r--. 1 sas sas 917504 Nov 30 10:43 licenseinfo.sas7bdat
Compare contents using the SAS 9 Inventory report
The next step is to open the SAS 9 Inventory report and look for differences between the two result sets. If you are not a member of the SAS Administrators group you will need to be added to the SAS Inventory Users group to open the report.
When you publish multiple inventory results, the SAS 9 Inventory report has a button bar across the top of the report that allows you to filter results for a single result set. So let's take a look at the PreUIP data first. Here we can see that there are 36 total Business Intelligence objects in the PreUIP deployment with 30 of those being Visual Analytics objects.
Let's compare these results with the PostUIP data. Selecting the PostUIP button displays contents from the updated environment and we do see that there is one less Visual Analytics object.
So the next question is, how can I determine exactly what the difference is?
Identifying differences
A quick and easy way to identify actual differences between result sets is to
- select the Drill to Items tab
- highlight one of the result sets (in this case, PreUIP),
- select the Business Intelligence bar in the Portfolio chart to isolate the content type for which we saw differences
- sort the detail table on Path, and then
- export detailed data to a CSV file.
Repeating the same steps but filtering for PostUIP before exporting the records then yields two CSV files: one with PreUIP BI content and the other with PostUIP content.
Now I can use my difference tool of choice to compare the two files.
In this instance, we can see (in blue) the extra item in the PreUIP content is just a sample provided by SAS that is not included in SAS 9.4M7 so I can ignore the difference. Notice that this report also identifies three Visual Explorations that were converted to Visual Analytics reports (highlighted in yellow). This is due to a change between SAS 9.4M5 and SAS 9.4M7 which did away with the Visual Exploration object.
If there are other differences in the SAS 9 Inventory report we can simply repeat this process, filtering for object types of interest. We could, of course, dump all object types at once but that may get unwieldy if your environments have a lot of content.
Conclusion
Given the challenge of validating an upgrade or migration, the SAS 9 Inventory can at least help quantify difference between two or more deployments. Knowing where differences occur should help focus your investigation into whether or not the difference is of a material concern. So whether you are doing an upgrade-in-place, a promotion of selected content, or a full on migration, consider including the SAS 9 Inventory in your post-upgrade validation plans.
