Strategic IT Architectures and The SAS SystemA Case Study of the Application of The SAS System within

British Gas Trading

Presenters: John Ingram - British Gas Trading Ty Sapsford - OCS Consulting Plc

British Gas Trading embarked upon a major development project in 1996/97 in orderto enter the electricity market at deregulation in April 1998. One of the systemswithin the programme required both OLTP and OLAP functionality to support aTrading business division initiative.

Trading selected The SAS System for delivering the OLAP functionality. Businessconstraints, driven by external market factors, created a situation requiring a quickresponse concerning the OLTP functionality. The SAS System’s flexibility andfunctional breadth made it a leading choice to respond to this situation.

The SAS System enabled IT to deliver to the business division a system that satisfiedthe business requirements, while meeting IT strategic objectives. This paper shalldescribe the IT architecture and how The SAS System supported this architecture. Abrief summary of the costs and benefits of the SAS System within a strategic ITarchitecture will conclude this paper.

Presenters Notes:

Corporate Strategic IT Architecture defined the hardware and software configuration of the system as:

Hardware:• Servers

• Digital ………………• Clients

• Compaq ……………..

Software:• Servers

• Database Server - Digital Unix v4.0b• Oracle v7.3.3.3• Open Process xxx.xx• Redbox xxx.xx

• Application Server - Windows NT v4.0 service pack 3• SMS Server xxx.xx

• Clients• Windows NT v4.0 service pack 3 Clients

• Lotus 1-2-3• Excel v7• SMS Client xxx.xx

The application scoping study deliverables identified the additional requirement for the selectedsolution to be located in the software configurations of both the Database and Application servers. TheSAS System v6.12 ts020 was selected. The following SAS modules are located on the servers:

• Database Server• SAS/Base• SAS/Connect• SAS/Access to Oracle

• Application Server• SAS/Base• SAS/Connect• SAS/Access to PC File Formats• SAS/Assist• SAS/AF *

* SAS/AF was used in the development environment to build the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

British Gas Trading IT architecture strategic objectives are defined in detail in many internaldocuments. The IT architecture objectives of interest to this application may be summarised as (SASMeeting IT Strategic Objectives:):

• Data Management• Data Access

• External Interfaces• Database Management

• Interface Definitions• Security• Backup and Recovery• Audit

• Security• Data Integrity

• Timely• Complete• Correct• Valid

• Data Consistency• Corporate Definitions• Business Unit Area Definitions• External Definitions

• Application Management• Delivery

• Unix Environment• Windows NT Environment

• Extendibility• Vendor Pedigree• Custom Application Code• Year 2000

• Recovery• Backup• Disaster

• Security• User Interfaces• Data Interfaces• Code

The following table highlights the experienced strengths and weaknesses The SAS System providedtowards the IT Strategic Architecture objectives (SAS Meeting IT Strategic Objectives:):

Objective: Strength WeaknessesData Management

Data AccessExternal Interfaces Strong support of proprietary and

non-proprietary file formatsprovided.

Separate SAS modules requiredfor proprietary file formats.

DatabaseManagement

InterfaceDefinitions

Support for required file formatsand proprietary access languagesenable interface definitions to useoptimal mechanisms.

Multiple skills required to supportSAS files, spreadsheet files, andOracle tables manipulations.

Security SAS datasets being proprietary areinaccessible to other products.SAS compiled code is equallyinaccessible to other productaccess manipulation. The optionexists to remove the access to thecompiled code source via TheSAS System tools or to applyaccess restrictions to the SASdatasets, though this was notpersued in the actual system.

The SAS System was required foraccessing the data or source code.

Backup andRecovery

SAS support of Oracle dbmssystem enabled leveragingOracle’s transactional recoveryfacilities. SAS metadata facilitiesenabled uncomplicated datamanagement systems to beprovided that required limitedeffort to build.

SAS not being a transactionalrelational database system, meantprovisioning for “transactionalrecovery facilities” was required.NOTE: This only becamenecessary when projectrestrictions decided The SASSystem would providetransactional facilities.

Audit SAS cross functional use,providing both OLAP and OLTPfunctionality, enable audittracking to be morecomprehensive than normallyanticipated by multi-vendorsolution.

Audit functionality not inherent inSAS modules. SAS support forobject orientated approachreduced much of the effort.

Security Operating and Oracle systemsecurity is fully supported bySAS. Customisation of standardSAS scripts necessary to tailor toeach operating environment isrelatively simple. Additionally,SAS provided further securitylayer, using Oracle as a profilestorage container. IntegratingOracle into the SAS securityenable British Gas Trading Oracleskills to be used in the securitymaintenance area.

Support for multiple securitylayers increased developmentefforts and user interfacecomplexity.

Objective: Strength WeaknessesData Management

Data IntegrityTimely The SAS applications integrated

well into the scheduling tool,Open Process. All processingcompleted within the business andIT requirements as demonstratedby the allocated batch window.Notable gains during later tuningefforts have been made.

Customise loading mechanismrequired for Oracle in DigitalUnix environment. Not providedby the default SAS/Access toOracle product This was resolvedusing SAS/Base and SAS/Accessto Oracle solution that OCS builtinto the system.

Complete The ability to capture an extensiverange of data formats within SASenable the solution to meet itscompleteness criteria.

Program complexity wasincreased by completenessrequirements. Perceivedweaknesses during early phaseswas restriction of supported datatypes within SAS of char (maxlength 200) and numeric (max 8bytes), though no formal businessrequirement for more than thesedata types was identified.

Correct Several elements of the datamodel required integration of thebusiness rules to ensure that a“correct” values are maintained,i.e. data values treated differentlydue to business environmentconditions. The ability torepresent these element’s datavalues was met using SAS’flexible data manipulationmethods and data representationformats.

Providing data correctnessrequired the data model tointegrate business rules. Thisincluded all stages of the project,i.e. documentation and diagrams,pseudocode and programmodules. Integration of SASwithin a CASE tool would haveminimised this effort, thoughsome additional effort may havebeen required to operate theCASE tool.

Valid The ability to validate a datarepresentation using a mixture ofSAS functions and data typeswithin a single procedure orsimple program module reducedeffort and increased both therange of validity checking and itsrobustness.

Duplicate processing occurred toenable more than simplex readerror failures. More sophisticatedmaintenance requirements,particularly with the databasefeed, i.e. Year 2000 supportincreased complexity of code.

Objective: Strength WeaknessesData Consistency

CorporateDefinitions

IT Strategic Architectureestablished the databaseenvironments, i.e. Oracle as thestrategic data repository. SAS’ability to actively integrate withinan Oracle environment ensuredthat data was captured, updatedand if necessary removed asdefined by the corporate datastrategy policies.

Performance was effected by theinherent overhead associated witha transactional dbms systemversus a informational. This ispartially offset by the advantagesof a transactional dbms withrecovery and to some degree withdatabase integrity.

Business Unit AreaDefinitions

Business requirements meant thedata required metamorphosingfrom the corporate definition toanother format was required. Theapplication of SAS SQL viewsand reformatting functions totranspose and manipulate the datatables enable the project to meetboth corporate and businessrequirements.

Controls implemented within thesolution assisted with ensure aconsistency was maintainedbetween the two definitions.These controls required additionaleffort. Using objects to performthe transformations reduced thiseffort, plus gains from operatingon an information dbms (SAS)data table with later processescounteracted part of the effortcost.

External Definitions The system interfaces with severalexternal entities, being bothinternal and external to theorganisation. SAS/BASE productprovided all the mechanisms tomeet the external organisationentity interface requirements. Theinternal interfaces were meetagain using SAS/BASE with theaddition of SAS/Access to PC FileFormats.

Additionally effort necessary to

Objective: Strength WeaknessesApplication Management

DeliveryUnix Environment Connectivity was easily

established with SAS/CONNECTproduct, with minimalcustomisation of the connectscript and using the chosencommunication protocol, i.e.TCP/IP. Access to the applicationis controlled by an Oracle tablecontaining users’ profiles. SAScatalogues minimised filemanagement and complementsecurity standards. SAS’ abilityto communicate with theoperating environment enableleveraging the Unix operatingsystem to perform maintenancefunctions on non-SAS file typesand to communicate with thesupport message system Redbox.

Unix connectivity and relativelypoor inherent access and securitycontrols increase exposure tounwanted access.

Windows NTEnvironment

The trading system was to supportthe ability for a user to have theirprofile fully portable. SAS’initiation process is managed byfiles in ASCII text format, i.e.config and autoexec files. Thetext format enable readycustomisation to ensure theapplication met the profilecriteria. The application profilewhile maintained in a SASproprietary file, i.e. profile.sc2,was known to the system as astandard file, thus was also readilyintegrated into the NTenvironment.

The text format of the config andautoexec files are a strength andweakness. A skilled person canreadily access and understand thefiles, thus additional accesscontrols were required.

ExtendibilityVendor Pedigree The stability and multi-platform

support of The SAS System metBritish Gas Trading softwarevendor pedigree standards. Themodular approach to configuringSAS fulfilled scalabilityrequirements.

The breadth of SAS led to someextra efforts being required toidentify certain operational systemspecific behaviours. This wouldnot be unique to SAS.

Custom ApplicationCode

Structured programming andobject orientated approachesmaximised reuseability whichreduced effort, actively assistedinterface consistency reducingeffort by development team andby users in learning theapplication, and lasted haveincrease ease to analysis andremedy changes to the tradingsystem.

Requires more analysis and designeffort to be expended initially toidentify modules/objects.

Objective: Strength WeaknessesApplication Management

ExtendibilityYear 2000 Combination of yearcutoff option

and range of date formats andfunctions made meeting year 2000compliance simple to perform.The SAS System version 6.12year 2000 compliant certificateand SAS’ support of providingyear 2000 setinit enable year 2000testing to be performed.

Performing full year 2000compliance was not possible dueto non-compliance of operatingsystem, thus some assumptions ofvalidity of year 2000 compliancewere necessary.

RecoveryBackup Use of SAS metadata and data

processing facilities supplied theapplication with the capability tovalidate backups during operation,which was critical particularlyduring some of the overnightbatch routines. Access tooperating system enable SAS toperform backup functions on non-SAS files.

Difficult for tester to validate SASfiles were correctly backed upwithout experience and access tothe SAS System. This was thesame for Oracle tables.

Disaster Use of similar metadata and dataprocessing facilities within theSAS System enabled theapplication to registered andperformed disaster recovery ordisaster notification whererecovery not possible.

The SAS System being aninformational database is notprovisioned with roll-back,journalising and other disasterfunctions. This was not criticaldue to the system as Oracle wasdefined as the data repository.The only risk was during Oracleupdates by SAS within theapplication.

SecurityUser Interfaces Three levels of security provided

by vendors, i.e. Windows NT,Unix and Oracle are integratedinto the application. Additionallya further level of security isencoded into the SAS/AFinterface. Use of initcmd, customprofile, custom config andautoexec files delivered via SMSenable users to be restrictedaccess to the SAS System exceptwhere this is provisioned withinthe application.

Extra effort is required to supportthe levels of security, which is anon-going cost for the business.

Data Interfaces SAS and Oracle security areincorporated. Oracle users aredefined roles which controlprivileges a users has withinOracle. SAS datasets and viewssupport encryption and accesscontrols where the functionalrequirements stated suchrequirement. All custom code andlibraries are supplied to the usersin readonly mode, with the users

A user with the appropriate levelsof skills could alter the librarymode, as could a user with theappropriate Oracle user id andpassword edit the data tables.

having only their private librariesavailable in write mode.

Code Access privileges are controlledusing NT file and folder privilegecontrols. This is furthercomplemented by accessprivileges assigned to the SAScatalogues. The option to providethe production environment withcompiled code missing source isalso available.

Operational support can beadversely effected by too muchcode security. Code security is anarea require content revisionduring the system life cycle.

Summary:• Balance Sheet

• Assets• Flexibility - providing transactional and informational facilities which are integral

to a trading system• Multi-platform support - enabled the trading system to implement the designated

optimal client/server solution• Open data support - ability to access and produce multiple file systems, i.e.

Oracle, Lotus 1-2-3, MS Excel, etc. provided flexibility and data options notreadily available to other systems

• 3rd and 4th generation language support - use of structured and object-orientatedapproaches code to integrated readily into the solution. Selective use ofappropriate methodologies to sections of the solution code be supported by thedevelopment team

• Year 2000 compliance - year 2000 compliance within the SAS System and theSAS custom code was able to be tested and documented

• Extendibility - The SAS System being readily expanded with new modules. Thecustom code using structured and object-orientated programming standardscoupled with coding standards enable both extensions and long-term support tobe provided with minimal additional effort.

• Liabilities• Provisioning of printing methods with the vendor software not as strong as

required. Thus increasing effort in development to provide hardcopy output• Proprietary nature of SAS data tables increases complexity of access to data held

within SAS. Thus increasing effort to ensure data stored within Oracle tableswhere data to be available to other systems, or where transactional functionalitiesrequired

• Service Level Agreement more complex as production support provisioning notwithin current British Gas Trading IT skill portfolio (SAS Skills). Commitmentto skill transferral and training required of both the vendor (SAS) and third partyconsultancy (OCS).

• Way Ahead

• Business Requirements Review• User Acceptance Testing

• Phase 2

Questions?

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JOHN INGRAM - STRATEGIC CONSULTANT, BRITISH GAS TRADINGJOHN INGRAM - STRATEGIC CONSULTANT, BRITISH GAS TRADINGTY SAPSFORD - SENIOR CONSULTANT, OCS CONSULTING plcTY SAPSFORD - SENIOR CONSULTANT, OCS CONSULTING plc

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IT STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE MILESTONESIT STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE MILESTONES

TRADING SYSTEM MILESTONESTRADING SYSTEM MILESTONES

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IT STRATEGIC ARCHITECTUREIT STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURETRADING SYSTEM ARCHITECTURETRADING SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

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DATA MANAGEMENTDATA MANAGEMENTAPPLICATION MANAGEMENTAPPLICATION MANAGEMENT

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SERVERSSERVERS●● DATABASE SERVER (SAS 6.12 TS020)DATABASE SERVER (SAS 6.12 TS020)

SAS/BASESAS/BASESAS/CONNECTSAS/CONNECT

SAS/ACCESS TO ORACLESAS/ACCESS TO ORACLE●● APPLICATION SERVER (SAS 6.12 TS020)APPLICATION SERVER (SAS 6.12 TS020)

SAS/BASESAS/BASE

SAS/CONNECTSAS/CONNECTSAS/ACCESS TO PC FILE FORMATSSAS/ACCESS TO PC FILE FORMATS

SAS/GRAPHSAS/GRAPH

SAS/ASSISTSAS/ASSIST

SAS/AFSAS/AF**

CLIENTSCLIENTS●● DESKTOPDESKTOP

NONENONE

* SAS/AF APPLICABLE IN DEVELOPMENT ONLY* SAS/AF APPLICABLE IN DEVELOPMENT ONLY

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●● EXTERNAL INTERFACESEXTERNAL INTERFACES●● DATABASE MANAGEMENTDATABASE MANAGEMENT

INTERFACE DEFINITIONSINTERFACE DEFINITIONSSECURITYSECURITY

BACKUP AND RECOVERYBACKUP AND RECOVERY

●● SECURITYSECURITY

●● TIMELYTIMELY●● COMPLETECOMPLETE●● CORRECTCORRECT●● VALIDVALID

●● CORPORATE DEFINITIONSCORPORATE DEFINITIONS●● BUSINESS UNIT AREA DEFINITIONSBUSINESS UNIT AREA DEFINITIONS●● EXTERNAL DEFINITIONSEXTERNAL DEFINITIONS

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●● UNIX ENVIRONMENTUNIX ENVIRONMENT●● WINDOW NT ENVIRONMENTWINDOW NT ENVIRONMENT

●● VENDOR PEDIGREEVENDOR PEDIGREE●● CUSTOM APPLICATION CODECUSTOM APPLICATION CODE●● YEAR 2000YEAR 2000

●● BACKUP AND RECOVERYBACKUP AND RECOVERY●● DISASTERDISASTER

●● USER INTERFACESUSER INTERFACES●● DATA INTERFACESDATA INTERFACES●● CODECODE

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