Date:         Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:00:59 -0400
Reply-To:     Quentin McMullen <qmcmullen.sas@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Quentin McMullen <qmcmullen.sas@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      SAS Server / EG/ Infomaps etc
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Hi All,

My (new) group is setting up a SAS server, and will start building BI
tools.  And while I haven't actually gotten my hands on anything yet,
I'm confused by some of what I'm hearing.

Big picture for my role would be something like I would want to take a
SAS macro that produces an accrual plot for a clinical trial, and make
it into a stored procedure that could be accessed via the web (Web
report studio, information delivery portal, whatever?) and let users
pass in a few parameters and generate a plot.

I'm confused as to the purpose/need for information maps, data
integration studio, etc.

Do I need to somehow "register" a dataset or libref with (with
integration studio, or some metadata server)  before I can use it in a
stored process?  (or even use it via EG running on the server?)

Imagine the accrual plot macro reads data from an access database
sitting on some file server on our network.  Suppose it reads it via
SAS/ACCESS to PC files, so in PC SAS all I need is a libref pointing
to the access database.

I'm sure I misunderstood, but in one meeting it sounded like in order
to have a SAS job that runs on the server read from the database, I
would need to either upload the actual database to the SAS server
(madness), or would need to go through some process of registering the
access database as a data source in the metadata server (which seems
odd).

So I'm confused.  Seems to me if my SAS code points to the access
database (or a SQL server database or a flat file or .....) I don't
understand why I would need to register the data source with the SAS
server at all.  I can't imagine that by using stored process or EG, I
lose the ability to simply create my own librefs within a session, or
write my own code to connect to a SQL database and do pass-through
queries. Do I?

I'm sure this will become more clear once we have a sandbox set up,
but since it's bothering me now, was hoping someone might be able to
straighten me out.

Thanks,
--Quentin