SAS Enterprise Miner – Free, on a Mac – But can you find your data?
SAS Enterprise Miner – Free, on a Mac – Bet You Didn’t See That Coming … but how the hell do you get your data on it?
I wanted to test SAS Text Miner and was surprised to find the university did not have a license. No problem – and it really was, astoundingly, no problem – I had SAS On-Demand Enterprise Miner on a virtual machine using VMware.
I had installed it thinking – “This probably won’t work but what the hell.”
Here are all the links on this blog on getting SAS Enterprise Miner to work in all of its different flavors, because I am helpful like that.
Let me emphasize that you just better have the correct version of the Java Run Time Environment (jre), don’t say I didn’t warn you, and after you have it running whenever Java asks if you want to update, give it a resounding, “NO!”
So, surprisingly, running Windows 8.1 Pro on a 4GB virtual machine, it pops open no problem.
Okay, now how to find your data.
Turns out that even if you have SAS Enterprise Miner you need to use SAS Studio to upload your data. So, you go to SAS Studio, on the top left hand side of your screen, you see an UP arrow. Click on that arrow and you will be prompted to upload your data.
Not so fast …. where do you want to put your data?
You can only upload the data if you are a professor but since I am, that should be no problem. There is also a note on my login page that
The directory for all of your courses will be “courses/lalal123/” .
The LIBNAME for your courses should be
LIBNAME mydata “courses/lalal123” access = readonly ;
Except that it isn’t. In fact, my course directory is something like
“courses/lalal123/c_1223”
I found that out only by calling tech support a few months ago where someone told me that. Now, when I look on the left window pane I see several directories, most of which I created, and a few I did not. One of the latter is named my_content. If I click on the my_content directory I see two subdirectories
c_1223
and
c_7845
These are the directories for my two courses. How would you have known to look there if you didn’t call SAS tech support or read this blog? Damned if I know, but hey, you did read it, so good for you.
If you leave off the subdirectory … say you actually followed the instructions on your login page and in your start code had this:
LIBNAME mydata “courses/lalal123” access = readonly ;
run ;
Why, it would run without an error but it would show your directory is empty of data sets, which is kind of true because they are all in those subdirectories whose name you needed to find out.
So …. to recap
1. Use SAS Studio to upload the data to the directory you are using for your SAS Enterprise Miner course. (Seems illogical but it works, so just go with it.)
2. In the start code for your SAS Enterprise Miner project, have the LIBNAME statement including the subdirectory which is under the my_content directory.
Once you know what to do, it runs fine. You can access your data, create a diagram, drag the desired nodes to it.
I’ve only been using this for testing purposes for use in a future course. For that it works fine. It is convenient to be able to pull it up on a virtual machine on my Mac. It is pretty slow but nowhere near as bad as the original version years ago, which was so slow as to be useless.
If you teach data mining – or want to – and your campus doesn’t have a SAS Enterprise Miner license, which I believe is equivalent to the cost of the provost’s first born and a kidney – you definitely want to check out SAS On-demand. It’s a little quirky, but so far, so good.