WARNING: Engine XPORT does not support SORTEDBY operations. SORTEDBY information cannot be copied.
24th July 2012
When recently creating a transport file using PROC COPY and the XPORT library engine, I found the above message in the log. The code used was similar to the following:
libname tran xport "c:\temp\tran.xpt";
proc copy in=data out=tran;
run;
When I went seeking out the cause on the web, I discovered this SAS Note that dates from before the release of SAS 6.12, putting the issue at more than ten years old. My take on its continuing existence is that we still to use a transport file format that was introduced in SAS 5.x for the sake of interoperability, both between SAS versions and across alternatives to the platform.
The SORTEDBY flag in a dataset header holds the keys used to sort the data, and it isn't being copied into the XPORT transport files, hence the warning. To get rid of it, you need to remove the information manually in the data step using the SORTEDBY option on the DATA statement or using PROC DATASETS, which avoids rewriting the entire data set.
First up is the data step option:
data test(sortedby=_null_);
set sashelp.class;
run;Then, there's PROC DATASETS:
proc datasets;
modify test(sortedby=_null_);
run;
quit;It might seem counterproductive to exclude the information, but it makes no sense to keep what's being lost anyway. So long as the actual sort order is unchanged, and I believe that the code that that below will not alter it, we can live with its documentation in a specification until transport files created using PROC CPORT are as portable as those from PROC COPY.
Installing VMware Player 4.04 on Linux Mint 13
15th July 2012
Curiosity about the Release Preview of Windows 8 saw me running into bother when trying to see what it's like in a VirtualBox VM. While doing some investigations on the web, I saw VMware Player being suggested as an alternative. Before discovering VirtualBox, I did have a licence for VMware Workstation and was interested in seeing what Player would have to offer. The, it was limited to running virtual machines that were created using Workstation. Now, it can create and manage them itself and without any need to pay for the tool either. Registration on VMware's website is a must for downloading it, though, but that's no monetary cost.
Once I had downloaded Player from the website, I needed to install it on my machine. There are Linux and Windows versions; it was the former that I needed, and there are 32-bit and 64-bit variants, so you need to know what your system is running. With the file downloaded, you need to set it as executable and the following command should do the trick once you are in the right directory:
chmod +x VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle
Then, it needs execution as a superuser. With sudo access for my user account, it was a matter of issuing the following command and working through the installation screens to instate the Player software on the system:
sudo ./VMware-Player-4.0.4-744019.i386.bundle
Those screens proved easy for me to follow, so life would have been good if that were all that was needed to get Player working on my PC. Having Linux Mint 13 means that the kernel is of the 3,2 stock and that means using a patch to finish off the Player installation because the required VMware kernel modules seem to silently fail to compile during the installation process. This only manifests itself when you attempt to start VMware Player afterwards to find a module installation screen appear. That wouldn't be an issue of itself were it not for the compilation failure of the vmnet module and subsequent inability to start VMware services on the machine. There is a prompt to peer into the log file for the operation, and that is a little uninformative for the non-specialist.
Rummaging around the web brought me to the requisite patch, and it works for Player 4.0.3 and Workstation 8.0.2 by default. Doing some tweaking allowed me to make it work for Player 4.04 too. My first step was to extract the contents of the tarball to /tmp where I could edit patch-modules_3.2.0.sh. Line 8 was changed to the following:
plreqver=4.0.4
With the amendment saved, it was time to execute the shell script as a superuser, having made it executable beforehand. This can be accomplished using the following command:
chmod +x patch-modules_3.2.0.sh && sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh
With that completed successfully, VMware Player ran as it should. An installation of Windows 8 into a new VM ran very smoothly, and I was impressed with the performance and responsiveness of the operating system within a Player VM. There are a few caveats, though. First, it doesn't run at all well with VMware Tools, so it's best to leave them uninstalled since it doesn't seem to need them either; it was possible to set the resolution to the same as my screen and use the CTRL+ALT+ENTER shortcut to drop in and out of full screen mode anyway. Second, the unattended Windows installation wasn't the way forward for setting up the VM, but it was no big deal to have that experiment thwarted. The feature remains an interesting one, though.
With Windows 8 running so well in Player, I was reminded of the sluggish nature of my Windows 7 VM and an issue with a Fedora 17 one too. The result was that I migrated the Windows 7 VM from VirtualBox to VMware, and all is so much more responsive. Getting it there took not a little tinkering, so that's a story for another entry. Based on my experiences so far, I reckon that VMware Player will remain useful to me for a little while yet. Resolving the installation difficulty was worth that extra effort.