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SAS’s powerful business intelligence (BI) solution requires the integration of data from diverse sources. As such, the SAS Data Integration solution is vital because its ETL functionality drives the collection, integration, and transformation of high volumes of data. SAS’s ETL can target a wide array of heterogeneous data sources to create data warehouses, data marts, and other BI and analytical data stores. But it does not consolidate, streamline, and control all enterprise-wide job scheduling. Therefore, the missing scheduling requirement for many SAS customers is the ability to schedule SAS programs seamlessly into a consolidated schedule that covers jobs across enterprise systems and applications. The Tidal Enterprise Scheduler adapter for SAS addresses the scheduling requirements for SAS’s BI and ETL solutions. It allows IT to schedule SAS jobs seamlessly within consolidated enterprise schedules.
By allowing customers to consolidate ETL jobs into the larger automated enterprise schedule, the adapter offers a single point of control for viewing and managing the complex, interdependent schedules that drive the enterprise. Through helping SAS customers manage ETL scheduling within the context of the larger enterprise operations schedule, this adapter can increase overall operational efficiency, and reduce the risk of errors because all dependencies can easily be accounted for and tracked in the enterprise schedule..
Using this Tidal adapter, SAS jobs can benefit from the extensive, rich scheduling features that are available to all Tidal Enterprise Scheduler jobs, such as calendar and/or event-based scheduling, alerting and centralized operational management via the Scheduler’s job activity console. In addition, features specific to SAS scheduling provide additional value for managing the SAS application.
Improved Control and Consolidation
With Tidal’s SAS adapter, organizations can add complex scheduling functions to their ETL processes and consolidate multiple schedules into one centralized console. Once the adapter is installed, minimal effort is required to define a SAS job within Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. Scheduling jobs involves three major steps:
- Picking the path to the Tidal SAS bridge program from a list of Tidal Scheduler variables
- Entering the SAS program name
- Selecting an environment file containing global configuration data from a list of Tidal Scheduler variables
By taking advantage of the enterprise adapter, organizations can create a job definition to manage simple and complex request sets defined within the SAS data integration environment. Tidal Enterprise Scheduler allows you to develop process streams and manage the information flow from a centralized console, thereby giving users greater control over all aspects of a job stream. Tidal Enterprise Scheduler provides virtually unlimited flexibility in developing process streams. Also, users can develop complex job streams that utilize the adapter to merge any system process and ERP application process into a cohesive, centrally managed job stream. This provides error detection, correction, and management across the enterprise. Since the SAS request set is defined like any other Tidal Enterprise Scheduler job, users can take full advantage of job dependencies, file dependencies, variable dependencies, calendars, events, and email notifications.
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| Job Definition – script-free integration of SAS jobs into master schedules that touch multiple systems increases efficiency and data reliability
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Check resources: Intelligent Automation can perform system diagnostics, such as
shown here, on system resource utilization
Tailored for SAS
Additionally, to further simplify the scheduling of SAS ETL jobs, the Tidal solution:
- Automatically checks database availability for required MSSQL and Oracle databases before
invoking a SAS program to prevent wasted processing time on programs that
could potentially fail in the middle due to database unavailability
- Monitors real-time by generating color-coded HTML logs files viewable
within Tidal’s Job Details dialog during and after a SAS program run
- Automatically analyzes log files, sets job status based on results, and
highlights errors
- Provides SAS program output, if applicable
- Easily overrides SYSPARM and other options with full Tidal Enterprise Scheduler variable replacement
- Allows easy job abort from job activity console without needing to know SAS.EXE process ID
- Supports audit and compliance through central archive repository of all log and output
- Tracks inactivity providing both alert and abort capabilities
- Detects console popups and provides alert capabilities
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| Job Details – automatically pinpoints important job performance issues to improve efficiency and data reliability
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How It Works
The SAS adapter uses a bridge program and required SAS libraries. The SAS server and repository can be on any machine in the data center. A SAS job is defined like any other Windows agent job to Tidal Enterprise scheduler. At a minimum, to schedule a SAS job all that is required is to select the bridge executable variable, enter the SAS program name, and select the appropriate configuration file variable.
Once the request is made to SAS, the Tidal adapter monitors the process until it completes. The adapter also captures the SAS process exit code, returns it to Tidal Enterprise Scheduler and provides additional log information about the request. In addition, the adapter allows users to maintain complete control over each request that is launched. The request can be cancelled, aborted, or rerun from Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, a feature that provides extensive user control over the environment.
The adapter launches processes based on defined calendars and schedules, and monitors and controls those processes as they execute. In addition, it provides error control and failure notification to enhance the overall business processes that drive an organization’s data processing requirements.
In summary, the SAS adapter leverages Tidal Enterprise Scheduler’s cutting-edge job scheduling technology to automate data feeds into business intelligent products.
