SAS DI - Need help setting up and testing test jobs on dev server (newbie here)

[meatballs12345]

Hi everyone!

Just a disclaimer: Long post ahead. I'm a newbie on SAS DI, just discovered it on my current project (3 weeks). I'm a 2 year SAS developer from my previous company and we're using SAS EG and unix. Basically, I don't know if I'll be using the correct terms for SAS DI since I'm learning it from scratch (no knowledge transfer occurred and no one has the in-depth knowledge about the tool since they just run things as per my leads and I'm currently the only SAS developer on my team), so please bear with me. 

Now, my task here is to help the project align their jobs and transformations with the updates done on the data sources (updated format, length, merged data sources). Already done with the analysis and so I'm ready to do the testing. They provided me a connection profile to be used for accessing the DEV and PROD servers. Now, as I am trying to test the copied jobs (modified) under the My Folder (not sure if this is the right thing to do), I discovered the following:

1. Any changes I made on the data sources/tables/transformations/jobs will impact its original version even though I specified the path on to my own path and renamed all of it.

Questions:

• Should I request for a connection profile under change management? Will it be done by an admin using SAS Management Console or can I do it if I have the right access?
• If given the connection profile under change management, are there any available guide online for modifying, setting up and testing the jobs? Or should I really pay for the training in order to know this? 😞

2. Not sure if this will help you, but I got an error as I'm trying to run the test job or even follow the workspace server connection test I found online. Please advise how can I proceed?

I'm really really willing to learn right now so feel free to correct any terms and knowledge that I have so far. Thank you so much in advance! 🙂

[SASKiwi]

I don't use SAS DI, but from what I understand SAS DI connects to your SAS installation via the SAS metadata server. The default port for that is 8561 but it may be different for your metadata server. If you use SAS EG or SAS Management Console, then they use exactly the same type of connection. So if your metadata server host name is SASMETADATA (substitute your host name) then that is the machine name you enter and try port 8561.

Also there's no problem creating your own connection profiles.

[meatballs12345]

Thanks for your reply! Yeees, that made me check if I can access SAS EG using that and it wont too. There might be some problems with the hostname that I'm using.

[Patrick]

"Or should I really pay for the training in order to know this?"

If you haven't worked with a metadata driven ETL tool before then yes, absolutely. Using DIS for ETL development is quite different from just writing SAS scripts. If you don't understand what you're doing then you're at serious risk to break DI job flows and/or mess-up SAS metadata badly.

[meatballs12345]

Thanks Patrick! Yes that's what I thought too. 😞

[LinusH · Accepted solution]

Aggre with @Patrick - DI is different beast than normal SAS programming. To give you a jump start on do's and dont's I can recommend a good (and funny i a nerdy way) presentation:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Data-Management/DI-Studio-WORST-Practice-from-SAS-UK-Forum-2018/t...

https://www.sas.com/en_gb/events/2018/sas-uk-forum/forum-resources.html

That said, a few comments on your situation:

- Developing from My Folder. That's a no. All objects (tables, jobs etc) have a metadata id. If you start copying and changing objects, you can very easily get corrupted jobs and a general mess. If you are multiple developers you should set up personal project repositories, so you can practice check-out/check-in of objects.

1. "a" - probably answered above. So yes, and it's usually done by a SAS admin

1. "b" - I don't there really exist general guidelines. What you should think about here is any co-ordination with other developrs/testers so you don't ruin each others testing by replacing data etc. Sometimes projects/sites has a role that does this kind of co-ordination. It could be a scrum master, test lead, relaese manager etc.

Generally speaking usually three environemnts are most common, dev (development and unit testing), test (system/integration/acceptance test) and prod. Some sites are having multiple environments in the same server to save money, which is possible.

2. Check with you SAS admin.

Good luck on your DI Studio path 🙂

[meatballs12345]

Thanks for answering all of my questions and for the presentation @LinusH! Really appreciate it 🙂