In an era when software updates are a dime a dozen, why should you care about SAS 9.3 being available today? With help from my colleagues and fellow bloggers here at SAS, I give you these top ten reasons:

1. When you fill out your brackets during March Madness next spring, you can use the updated Survival Node in Enterprise Miner to determine not just if your team will survive, but for how long.
2. Austin Powers and Greg Brady are meeting now to discuss the new GROOVY procedure in Base SAS.
3. Speaking of the 70s, it's time to redistribute those old tweed jackets: Tweedie distribution is now supported in a number of PROCS.
4. If you plan to compete in Project Runway, rejoice: SAS Model Manager 3.1 now has the ability to retrain models.
5. With PROC SEVERITY in production status, only SAS can tell you how bad is bad, important in the case of something severe, like, say a Zombie Apocalypse.
6. The UNIVARIATE procedure supports fitting the Gumby distribution to data. Wait! I misread that. Turns out, it's the Gumbel distribution.
7. SAS BI consultant Angela Hall calls this one PROC SAVE: SAS GRAPH ODS capabilities move from SAS GRAPH right into BASE SAS. Cha-Ching!
8. Use the YRDIF function to calculate the age of your favorite bottle of wine down to the tenth decimal place.
9. Dolly the sheep offers an enthusiastic, "Baaaa ..." for the improved control over CLONE-ing, in these updates to the CLONE and NCLONE options for copying.
10. Finally ... because analytics is the hottest
    career for today’s graduates and jobseekers. Who wouldn’t want the upper hand?

So, that was fun. But in all seriousness, this isn't your typical app store upgrade. One look at the release documentation from SAS Publishing, and you can see that dozens of SAS products are being improved with hundreds of new features and capabilities. If you'd prefer a quick overview instead of the full documentation, read the specifics on the SAS support site or get a quick overview in the SAS 9.3 press release.Finally, add your top reasons to care about 9.3 in the comments or on Twitter by using the hash tag #SAS.