SAS Business Intelligence Facilities

THE BI ARCHITECTURE

The SAS Intelligence Platform consists of a multi-tier environment, normally represented by the

• Client tier

• Middle tier

• Server tier

In the most basic terms, if an application is installed on the machine the user is sitting at, that machine is the client tier. There are three different types of SAS client applications.

• Java clients—run in a Java run-time environment (JRE) and installed on the machine where it is used.

• Windows clients—run in the Microsoft Windows environment and installed on the machine where it is used.

• Web clients run in a Web browser by connecting to a Java Application Server or Servlet Container on the middle tier. Only the Web browser is installed on the local machine.

Recent practice has shown many customers new to the SAS 9 environment are bewildered by the seemingly vast array of different client tools available.

Now for the secret sauce that separates SAS amongst its competitors. SAS adopted a strategy when designing the SAS 9 architecture based upon user personas, or roles, each representing a part of the life cycle of BI-from source databases through IT, to power users, decision makers, and operational staff-SAS organized its BI client tools into categories along the following lines.

In terms of the general BI features and functions listed above, SAS capabilities can also be categorized as follows:

• OLAP (On-line analytical processing) —the statement here is that OLAP requires some kind of multidimensional structure (MOLAP), like those supported by the SAS OLAP Server and SAS

OLAP Cube Studio, and exploited through the SAS Information Delivery Portal via Information Maps, SAS provides ROLAP capabilities through SAS Web Report Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide.

• Query and Reporting —SAS Web Report Studio allows data to be exploited through in order Maps and Stored Processes. Information Maps in particular provide a very powerful way to deliver filtering criteria and data roles to the business while hiding the complexity of the underlying data structure.

• Advanced Analytics—any SAS process can be encoded as a Stored Process to allow non-technical users to run on demand. Stored Processes can be exploited through a variety of tools in the BI Platform.

• Collaborative BI—SAS Web Report Studio provides a mechanism for adding descriptive text to data-derived report entities. Also, the SAS Information Delivery Portal has some teamwork functionality in the form of a built-in metadata search engine, and the ability to bookmark and split reports.

• Corporate presentation Management (Portals, Scorecards, Dashboards) —the SAS Information Delivery Portal is a solid structure for dashboards. The forthcoming BI Dashboard Framework provides a set of easily-used widgets to assemble dashboards and scorecard-type reports.

• Proactive BI (BAM) —SAS provides some of the plumbing for event-based BI in the form of alerts via the SAS Information Delivery Portal in Enterprise BI Server. However, there is no ‘out of the box’ event management or rules engine.