Use SAS with multiple cores in a CPU – and other hardware considerations

SAS does use multiple cores in some of it’s procedures eg. PROC SORT, PROC SQL (order by and group by) and others. The use of parallel execution was introduced with SAS version 9. A description of how SAS uses threads can be found here.

It is possible to test the use and impact of executing SAS using multiple cores in parallel by using the OPTION NOTHREADS. This option tells SAS, not to use parallel execution when possible. OPTION THREADS is on by default. It is also possible to do some experimenting with OPTIONS CPUCOUNT where it is possible to set the number of cores for SAS to use in it’s execution of the SAS-program.
Experience says that SAS works best in a 4 core environment. Which probably has something to do with  Amdahls law. That is of course not the case if your system handles multiple users or you start multiple SAS-processes eg. through the use of RSUBMIT with multiple tasks in one SAS-session or a script that starts multiple SAS-sessions.
If you are operating in an Intel environment the type of processor you use can have a big impact on the performance of your SAS-program. Intel XEON X5000-series performs a lot better than the Intel XEON X7000-series. Rule of thumb is that for big jobs a high clockfrequency is preferable.

Another rule of thumb is to use 4GB of RAM per core on a 64bit system and 2GB of RAM per core on a 32bit system of course depending on your individual use of the available memory. Paging of the memory should of course be avoided.

Reading from SSD disks connected to the server is of course very fast but still expensive considering that you probably need some sort of RAID configuration. Writing temporary files and log files to SSD disks could give a performance advantage, but with long seriel writes cheaper disk maybe connected through a SAN might give a better performance than SSD disks.

Securing the Tabular BI Semantic Model

Summary: This paper introduces the security model for tabular BI semantic models in SQL Server 2012. You will learn how to create roles, implement dynamic security, configure impersonation settings, manage roles, and choose a method for connecting to models that works in your network security context.

Download here

Opening PowerPivot data with Excel in Sharepoint 2010

It’s is not possible to use Excel through Sharepoint 2010 on PowerPivot data, if you are using a claims based authentication provider.

Although classic mode sign-in is not required for the more common data access scenario (where PowerPivot data is extracted from the same Excel workbook that renders it) do not attempt to use PowerPivot for SharePoint with SharePoint web applications that are configured to use other authentication providers. Doing so will result in a connection failure whenever users try to connect to PowerPivot workbooks as an external data source.
Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210621.aspx

If anyone has a solution to this please let me know by commenting this post.
One possible solution could be to use a third party OLAP-browser for example the freeware version of Ranet Uilibrary Olap or the commercial version of Ranet Uilibrary Olap.