2022-6-23 Communications Call

1. Monthly User Experience Satisfaction Survey

2. Confluence Space Improvements Demo

3. System Updates

a. Background Submit Issues - Resolved

b. False Long Running Jobs Notifications - Resolved

c. Lagging Issues 

4. Data Source Known Issues

5. Best Practices Review

        a. Workbench vs. SAS Contents 

        b. Hive Schema Clean Up

5. User Collaboration Wiki Article Review

6. Notebook Alternative Pilot

7. Q&A  

• The Public Confluence space had a few improvements added recently. We added new drop down navigation and headers to the pages to make them consistent with the CCSQ look and feel.
• The pages are located here CCSQ Data & Analytics.
• More changes will be implemented in the future to improve the user experience.

Background Submit Issues - Resolved!

• Issue Description: Some users were reporting issues with background submitting in SAS Viya. Some were reporting spinning while others were reporting that log files were not showing up or populating after the job completed.
• Users are no longer reporting this issue and additional testing has discovered the issue has been resolved. 

False Long-Running Job Email Notification Issue - Resolved!

• Issue Description: Some users may have been receiving long-running SAS job email notifications for SAS jobs that do not exist.
• Users are no longer reporting this issue, the issue has been resolved.

Lagging Issues 

• Issue Description: SAS Viya users have reported intermittent lagging and freezing while utilizing the application.
• Resizing efforts took place during the April 22nd maintenance event to help address this issue. Additional resizing efforts will take place in future maintenance events to help ensure system stability. More specifics of when these resizing changes will be applied will be shared shortly.

Scheduled CAP & CDR Maintenance Schedule

• July 8th
• August 5th

• All events will begin at 8:00 pm ET and end approximately at 11:00 pm ET. A communication will be sent out once maintenance is complete. As a reminder, whenever there is maintenance on the environment, you will need to make sure all of your code and table changes are saved.

Known Issues

• BIC MBI Sequence - 8/25/2021
  • Ongoing – TBD
• QMARS Longer Text Fields - 1/12/2021
  • Ongoing - TBD
  • Consider using healthcare_service_qmars_ng if your DUA supports it

Workbench vs SAS Contents

Please ensure to store all of your data in SAS Viya within your organization’s workbench folder, rather than the SAS Contents area. The SAS Contents data is stored directly on the SAS Server and cannot be restored without a full restore of the entire SAS System. SAS Viya workbenches are backed up to S3 and, in the event of accidental deletion or data loss, versions can easily be restored from an AWS back up.

We recommend the SAS contents area only be used by organizations working in SAS Visual Analytics, as it is the only SAS Service not able to read from the workbenches. Regardless, we still recommend that those organizations backup their data in the workbenches.
Action Needed: If your organization has data stored in the SAS Contents area, please move/back it up to the workbench folder as soon as possible. Please reach out to the Data & Analytics helpdesk if you have any questions or require any assistance

Hive Schema Clean Up

A reminder to all organizations to please periodically review their SAS Viya Hive schema for any duplicate, temporary, or outdated data. Regular cleaning of these schemas is essential to ensure both that organizations do not run up against their storage quotas, which would leave them unable to write to those schemas, as well as ensuring strong HDFS system performance. The %usage_hive(); macro in SAS Viya is available for all users to confirm the current size of the hive schemas they have access to.

• MDS Assessment Condition Indicators for Medicare Beneficiaries
• User Collaboration Wiki link

Overview

• The pilots will allow us to confirm with users whether EMR Studio + EMR or Databricks Notebooks + DB Compute would be a better long-term alternative to replace Zeppelin and Ambari

• This is being done to provide a stable, scalable environment, improve developer productivity, and decrease analysis runtimes

• We are collecting and analyzing user feedback throughout the pilot to ensure the tool meets the needs of the community

Status

1. Databricks – Active Evaluation

  2. EMR Studio / EMR Serverless – Upcoming Evaluation

  3. Zeppelin – will be retired once a new tool is place

1. Q - Could you share the link to the Data & Analytics Confluence pages?
   A - CCSQ Data & Analytics

2. Q - Who can we contact if we have questions with the long text field issue for the complaint description column in QMARS?

   A - Please Slack message William Kelly with any questions.
3. Q - Do you still track Vertex Errors?
   A - Yes we do track them. They are an anomaly, but please submit a helpdesk ticket.
4. Q - Could you share the Wiki page link?
   A - User Collaboration Wiki
5. Q - How can we request the access to the Notebook?
   A - The pilot is limited to a few testers. Once the pilot is done we can open the tool up to everyone. It will be about 3 months before the tool is released.