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Hari
Calcite | Level 5
Hi,

My company is planning to procure SAS EG and I want to know whether I can use data sets in my laptop or not. Many parts of the documentation kept on stressing about data being on local and remote server. Iam not sure whether I could use data from my own laptop without uploading it to any Server.

A cursory read through "Administering SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1" made me feel as if one needs a fairly dedicated IT person to manage repositories and administer EG. Are my concerns justified? Why am asking is PC SAS doesnt need any "maintenance" other than downloading hot fixes at irregular times.(We would have 10 folks using EG in my department.)

Would be grateful if somebody could clear up on the same.

Regards,
HP
India
5 REPLIES 5
ChrisHemedinger
Community Manager
HP,

You can easily use local SAS data sets with EG. If your configuration is SAS for Windows and EG installed on your personal machine, then there is virtually no administration necessary.

If you and your 10 colleagues share a central SAS server, all connecting to that server via EG, then there is a bit of administration necessary to configure that. However, even that process is pretty straightforward, and you can still use your local SAS data sets (EG will move them to the remote machine as needed).

Chris
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Hari
Calcite | Level 5
Chris,

Thanks for the response.

Please note, we would be sharing a central SAS sever.
I would like a little clarification on "EG will move them to the remote machine as needed". The reason why I asked about accessing data from Laptop is that many times my team members might be working on data sets as big as lets say 1 GB or so. We didnt want to go through the trouble of uploading it on the remote server.

In what situation does EG need to move the data sets to remote machine? Is this applicable for some specific Proc or data steps only? Also, wouldnt our servers get clogged if EG starts transfering these huge files.

Please throw some light on the same.

HP
India
ChrisHemedinger
Community Manager
HP,

Okay, put on your sunglasses -- here comes the light!

Enterprise Guide is a client application to SAS. Its main charter is to make SAS easy to use, but it relies on SAS to do all of the heavy lifting for data management, reporting, and analytics. So most work that you do in Enterprise Guide is represented in SAS programs that Enterprise Guide generates on your behalf.

For SAS programs to run with your data, your data must be accessible to the SAS server that is doing the processing. If you use Enterprise Guide to select local data from your PC to analyze, then Enterprise Guide does you the great favor of moving your data to a remote server, when necessary, in order to provide SAS with access to it.

If you have small data files, you probably won't even notice this transition. But large data files (and I consider 1GB large) would introduce a noticable delay. For this reason, it would be better for you to define access to your data relative to the SAS server. That means defining a SAS library that resolves to the location where your data is located, and then accessing that data via the SAS library instead of via the local PC file system.

Chris
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JohnH
Fluorite | Level 6
If you have large data files and wish to use SAS Connect to have another computer do the processing, I gave paper # 065-31 at SUGI 31 that might help. It is called,

"SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS/CONNECT Software: Peaceful Co-Existence Using SAS Code"
Andrew_F
Calcite | Level 5
I just posted a suggestion about using UNC addressing in another thread but would curious for others opinions.

I administer multiple SAS9 servers where I have numerous libraries defined in metadata to allow each server to access another's file system e.g.

libname proj1 "\\sas01\shareddata\proj1\sasdata" ;

My reasoning is that modern LAN connections are faster than I/O on disk drives and SAS has numerous other performance bottlenecks.

If I had 10 laptop users, then I would consider putting all the data on a fast file server and allowing users to access it via defined shares.

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