I’ve been to a fair number of SAS User Group International (SUGI) and SAS Global Forum conferences over the years, but I don’t think I’ve been to one as productive, well-organized and fun as this year’s conference in Washington DC. Part of what made the conference very relevant for many
“Something old or new, borrowed or blue” - forgive the paraphrase of the items chosen to bring good luck to brides! Recently I’ve been involved in several situations where SAS customer IT organizations have proposed architectures for new SAS software that are not up to snuff. It occurred to me
Last month I shared the idea of fostering better communication and understanding between the SAS users and the IT organization by visiting each other at your places of work. A variation on that idea is for both parties to share a visit to a safe, neutral, inviting location where there
Perhaps you’ve heard of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. Started in 1992, this event takes place on the fourth Thursday in April and is intended to broaden the horizons of our young people and to help them explore life choices. Long before this day officially existed on
In an interesting coincidence, I spoke to IT groups from two different companies with two very different visions for how SAS will be used, on the same day. The first IT group was from a small nonprofit organization that wants to use SAS to analyze member data and design campaigns.
Talk about a Halloween nightmare. In a frightening example of bad timing, one SAS shop’s completion of a SAS 9.3 upgrade and replication of their development and production servers coincided with a data storage mount failure in the data center. The result? An inability to restart the metadata server and
Everyone loves Top Ten lists. These lists continue to be a highlight on David Letterman’s Late Show, they’re a staple for identifying the best songs, best movies, and best (or worst) of everything else. In fact, if you search for “Top Ten” on Google, you get nearly two billion hits.
Chances are, you have a breaker box or a fuse box in your home. When you plug one too many appliances into an outlet in your kitchen and overload the circuit, a circuit breaker trips to protect the wiring and to prevent a fire. The handy description next to each
In nearly 30 years as an instructor, systems engineer and technical architect, I’ve heard from many SAS users that it can be a challenge to explain to the IT organization what SAS is and why it’s important. Why is this lack of communication a problem? It often means that your
