Wednesday 13 April 2011

NOTE: SAS Global Forum 2011 - Back-Ups, and The Last Word

My trip to SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas was valuable to me for many reasons. I learned a lot of information about a) SAS in general, and b) SAS 9.3 (to be released later this year). I echo many of the sentiments of SAS's Mike Kalt in this week's blog entry.

My hotel internet bill issue is now resolved, but my small poll of friends suggests that a significant number of those who booked accommodation through  the conference web site (and hence gained entitlement to free internet access in their hotel) were refused free use of the internet and/or had to pay. Only those who persisted with their claim through several layers of hotel management were successful, the others just didn't use the internet or they paid (twice).

Anyway, on a more positive note, I enjoyed SAS's Bubba Talley's BI 9.2 Troubleshoting paper. In addition to some valuable hints and tips about symptoms, investigations, resolutions and prevention, Bubba also spoke about SAS 9.3. According to Bubba, back-ups in 9.3 will be manageable from SAS Management Console; will be executed in a separate thread; the server will remain up and operational; configured during install; replaces %omabakup; features roll-forward recovery; and allows for ad-hoc back-ups. Nice!

And finally, all SAS Gloabl Forum 2011 papers are now available online within the SAS Support web site. In addition to Bubba's paper, you'll find mine(!) and many, many others.