When you use Model Studio to create a project in SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning, the following error might be displayed:

When the problem occurs, the first error might be followed by this error:

Note: To locate and download the Project Data Advisor log, see Downloading Logs in the SAS^® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning 8.5: User’s Guide.

This problem is common when the data source is created from a Microsoft Excel file that allows a file name or column name that is longer than 32 characters.

For additional information, see SAS Note 65282, "The error 'The data advisor failed to run on the selected data source ...' occurs when you create a project in Model Studio."

For English and German (both of which use one byte per character), the error occurs when a table name or column name is more than 32 characters (that is, more than 32 byes). The problem happens, as well, in the following situations:

• • You import SAS tables into Model Studio where the table name or column names are created in non-English characters. Model Studio uses the UTF-8 encoding by default for the SAS programming run-time environment. The problem occurs when the multibyte character set (MBCS) encoding is used for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For these languages, the encoding uses three bytes per character. So, any table names and column names of more than 10 characters in this encoding surpass the 32-byte limit.

• • You create a SAS^® 9.4 table that uses a double-byte character set (DBCS) encoding such as EUC-KR. In this scenario, the name can be as long as 16 characters (because the EUC-KR encoding uses two bytes only per character.) However, if you import this table into Model Studio, the project creation fails. 

To work around this problem, rename table names or column names so that the names use 32 bytes or fewer, as is required by the UTF-8 encoding.