SAS Tips

The SAS Relationship Reporter batch tool provides reports about the relationships between SAS content objects in the SAS Folder Tree.

1. Lineage, impact, direct and in-direct dependencies are four standard reports available out of the box.  Note starting with SAS 94M3, these automatically loaded each hour with a clean up scheduled by default to run at 11 PM.  These reports could be customized for a more precise reporting.
2. The relationships are referred to as ‘subjects’.  One or mode locations in SASFolders could be selected, or limit the report’s scope and or output by using filters.
3. Reports could be written to standard out (console) or to a file.

Pre-Requisite to Run Relationship Reporter Tool

The tool could be run on any machine that has SAS-Install-Dir/SASPlatformObjectFramework/9.4/tools installed.

The Relationship Reporting tool requires the contents are first analyzed and the resulting relationship data must be loaded to database.  To load this data one of the following could be used:

1. Run the sas-relationship-loader command. This command includes filters that you can use to limit the amount of content that is analyzed.
2. Schedule job to load relationship data regularly.  Note, starting with SAS 9.4TS1M3 the job is loaded automatically and by default on an hourly basis.

Command

The command sas-relationship-reporter

Standard Reports

Following standard reports are available:

Note: The relationships that are listed in the predefined reports are limited based on the scope of the relationship loading process and on the connecting user’s permissions.

Scope of Relationship Reports

The scope of the relationship loading process determine limitation of the reported related objects as follows:

• On lineage, dependency, and indirect dependency reports (and custom reports with a direction of TO), nested relationships are reported only for objects that were included in the scope of the relationship loading process. For example, if loaded relationship data focuses on Folder A, not Folders B and C, a lineage report for an information map in Folder A report would list the map’s relationships to tables, libraries, and data items in Folder B and Folder C but would not list nested dependencies for those related objects.
• On impact reports (and custom reports with a direction of FROM), related objects are reported only if they were included in the scope of the relationship loading process. For example, loaded relationship data contains data for Folder A, but not for Folders B and C the resulting impact report for a table in Folder A would not list the table’s relationships to information maps, cubes, and SAS Web Report Studio reports in Folder B and Folder C.

Best Practices for Using the Relationship Reporter

The use of the -report option is recommended when Starting with the Relationship Reporter; to specify one of the predefined reports. These reports may provide information appropriate for majority of its consumers.

Once experienced with the predefined reports, use the relationship filter (-rel) options to obtain more fine-tuned results. These options could be used to override the default settings of the standard reports or to create custom reports.

Part III of this article will contain practical usage examples, stay tuned for it.