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Wednesday, July 8. 2009

SAS Using SAS for Reporting

SAS customers often ask me "How do you use SAS?" My use of SAS is very limited these days, but my co-workers do some amazing things every day. We at SAS use SAS software to accomplish all sorts of business tasks and some purely entertaining ones too. (I'm sure you've seen the blackjack and Sudoku programs at SAS Global Forum.) No matter what programs and tools we create using SAS software, we are encouraged to share our feedback with developers and testers.

I have decided to highlight some our uses for you. You will find them under the SAS Using SAS category at the right. My first interview was with Emily Wallace, Senior Director of the SAS Knowledge Management Center. I asked Emily if she could tell me what kinds of applications her organization writes using SAS software. The answer: "We use SAS for everything!" Lucky for this blog post, she offered some great details. She provided so much interesting information that I have struggled to find things to cut! The following is what I kept from our interview for this post.

Reports are delivered to internal portals
The Knowledge Management Center manages three internal reporting portals that provide information of varying details to different levels of management and staff. Each morning after the corporate warehouse data is refreshed, batch jobs run and construct all the reports in each portal. These programs run on a variety of platforms (Microsoft Windows desktop, Windows server, UNIX, Linux, and z/OS) and use tried-and-true SAS elements and procedures, such as DATA steps, PROC SQL, PROC GCHART, PROC SORT and others. The generated reports are used daily to manage and influence sales and business decisions.

Improvements achieved with SAS 9.2
SAS 9.2 provided a 25% improvement in elapsed time for batch jobs compared to the same jobs running in SAS 9.1.3. Other improvements:

Queries run in less than 1 second on 9.2 SAS/SHARE servers. They were running in about 2 seconds on 9.1.3 servers.
Both PROC SORT and PROC SQL are noticeably faster, which benefits both batch and interactive users.

Wallace said, "Our users are noticing that their reports are refreshed earlier each morning and their queries return reports more quickly. They are happier because they can do reports themselves. They can do more complex queries because response times are better."

Providing product feedback
I was curious to learn if an internal SAS user gets the same software as our customers do. So I asked Emily if they used pre-released or special software. Nope! The applications written and managed by the Knowledge Management Center are production applications that are used to help run our business. For that reason, they use production software; the same software that SAS ships to customers. (They do install and test pre-release software at times when they need the functionality or when they want to get a jump on the new products and features. Wouldn't you?)

The experience and knowledge gained by groups like the Knowledge Management Center help to improve the software. Because they try to move to new releases as soon as possible, they are able to provide feedback to R&D and Technical Support. This group has found that the R&D staff is very receptive to the feedback and willing to help identify ways to deliver the functions that users are requesting.

What else do they use?
I couldn't get to everything that I learned about how the Knowledge Management Center uses SAS into this post. Below are a few more of the SAS tools and products that they use in their applications.

SAS Strategic Performance Management
SAS/IntrNet with the SAS/CONNECT driver for Java.
SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office

Your feedback
Let me know what you think of the SAS using SAS series. Do you find this information useful or helpful? Would you like to see more postings like this? What type of details do you want to see?

Posted by Renee Harper in SAS 9.2, SAS using SAS at 08:55 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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What a great series idea. I've been thinking about doing a SAS using SAS story for sascom magazine, so I'll be paying attention to your posts on this topic. What else would I like to know? What are the business users doing with the reports from the Knowledge Management center?

#1 Alison (Homepage) on 2009-07-09 09:09 (Reply)

At SAS, we "dogfood" our stuff all over the place.

Here's one example from me:

http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/index.php?/archives/44-Mmm,-dogfood.html

Chris

#2 Chris (Homepage) on 2009-07-10 13:50 (Reply)

Great to hear two things:
1) that Emily is still at SAS. I recall her great work in R&D for SAS/Access
2) that 9.2 will deliver performance improvements for batch processing. 25% improvement over an entire DW update suite is far better than the "don't expect any performance improvement" we had heard locally.
Could Emily please tell us whether this was IO or CPU performance improvement?

#3 Mike O'Neil on 2009-07-14 19:10 (Reply)

Hi Mike,
It's great to hear from you and I'm glad you're still involved with SAS projects. The 25% improvement we noticed is in CPU and elapsed time and we saw this type of improvement in most of our large batch jobs. Memory usage increased by 5% - 8% so we've switched to SAS 9.2 for all of our production and development usage.

#3.1 Emily Wallace on 2009-07-15 18:18 (Reply)

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ABOUT THIS BLOG

Welcome to the blog about SAS online support. Renee Harper (that's me) will keep you up-to-date about new and updated content on support.sas.com, as well as support services and software releases. I'll try to include relevant examples you can use -- sample programs and information about how others use SAS. I’ll be able to do this better if you join me – this is a place to share your ideas, successes, and frustrations.