SAS Enterprise Miner: Not for the faint of heart (or Mac owners)

A few years ago, when I was at USC, I tried to get a desktop version of Enterprise Miner to run on a virtual machine on my Mac and that never happened, although I did get it working on a Windows machine I had at home.

Last week, I wrote about my failed attempt to get SAS Enterprise Miner from SAS On-demand to run on a Mac running Windows under boot camp.

Since then, I have successfully installed Enterprise Miner and started it using a Windows native machine.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for my Macs. Using boot camp on two different Macs, one running Windows 7 and another with Windows 8.1 I have had the same problems.

Be aware that if you are going to run Enterprise Miner on any operating system you are going to need at least some idea of what a C: prompt is and feel comfortable poking around things like .dll files.

You might think that this can be assumed and goes without saying if you are teaching, or even taking, a course in data mining. You would be wrong. Nothing can be assumed or goes without saying. Trust me on this.

I am not going to assume that you checked your configuration and the appropriate Java Runtime Environment is installed. If that is not the case,or you are not sure, go here and take care of that now. (See how this not assuming thing works?)

If that is taken care of, regardless of operating system, you will probably have a problem on Java security blocking the application from starting.  For me, changing Java security setting to medium fixed that on all 3 machines. I tried several other things that did NOT fix it. To find your Java security settings, you can go to the control panel (in Windows 8, search for control panel first) and then search for Java with control panel. Click on Java, then the security tab to find the slider to move to medium.

At this point, the Windows machine worked, even though I had to click on several boxes where Java asked me was I ***SURE*** I wanted to do this.

With the Mac though, after I click on Start SAS On Demand Software, Enterprise Miner – it downloads a main.jnlp file which when I open  it,  I eventually get a message an error exists in the user services configuration. You can see screenshots here The same exact problems occurred with both Mac computers running boot camp.

The ever-helpful Rebecca Ottesen said that two of her students using Macs last semester had the same problem and sent me an email directing me to this site.

So, I did a PROC OPTIONS in SAS, which I had loaded on my desktop and verified that the .dll file was located where expected

— and this led me to thinking, wait a minute, my students aren’t going to have SAS loaded on their computers so what are THEY going to do to troubleshoot.

That was kind of a moot point, though, because …

When I got to step 3 and type in the command as directed in the exact directory directed.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.6.0_24>java -fullversion

I get the error message ‘java’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

Now, there could be any number of other things to try but the fact is, I have other things to do and the course is not for a few months. I will keep plugging away and keep you abreast here. If I do decide to go with Enterprise Miner in the fall, I am sure these posts will be helpful references for students.

I do want to advise anyone who is thinking about using the on-demand version of Enterprise Miner to be aware that you are definitely going to have at least a few problems with getting it installed, for example, the security thing, and if you have any students using boot camp, they are going to most likely hate you.