Many SAS customers are quickly adopting 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows, and they are pleased-as-punch when they find a 64-bit version of SAS to run on it. They waste no time in deploying the new version, only to find that a few things don't work quite the same as they
A storyboard is a blueprint of drawings/ideas in a specific sequence to illustrate a story. Let’s take the Pixar film Toy Story as an example (I have a two-year-old and admittedly have watched this movie more than the hairs on my head). Before they ever began animating with the design
In this second Tech Talks chat, Chris Hemedinger talked with R&D staffers about SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, SAS iPad apps, and some really cool "From the labs." Check out his talk with Nascif Abousalh-Neto, Manager of SAS BI Visualization R&D; Scott McQuiggan, Manager of SAS BI Mobile R&D; and
A basic tenet in any profession - whether you're a statistical programmer, developer or blogger - is save your work. For statisticians, saving is important, but archiving is KING! You never know when your client may want you to roll back to a previous version or when someone else may
On Friday before the conference, I presented a 1 day "developer led" seminar on SG Procedures and GTL, along with a discussion of new features for SAS 9.3. The experience was very gratifying as all users were now using SAS 9.2, and some were using SAS 9.3. We had a lively
This past Monday, Tricia and I released our 2nd book this year. "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" provides a step-by-step approach to transitioning from SAS code into user driven (prompted) stored processes. Trimming down all the things you can do with SAS Stored Processes is next to
SAS Global Forum 2012 at Orlando, Florida is just round the corner and we are excited to see so many presentations offered by users on SG procedures and GTL. We'll add a few more on new SAS 9.3 features of SG procedures and GTL. These include cluster groups for discrete and interval axes, cluster
For me, this will be a SAS Global Forum of many "firsts". My first Closing Session. My first time attending as a staffer outside of SAS R&D (well, except for the chilly SUGI 21 in Chicago). And my first chance to host the SAS Tech Talk sessions, which will be
Hi. I'm Amy Peters, Product Manager at SAS. I've scheduled a meetup at this year's SAS Global Forum to talk with you about WebDMS (in Northern Hemisphere E-2 at the Dolphin). It's under development - the basic version is due to be released this summer on SAS® 9.3 for use by SAS OnDemand for Academics for
ODS Graphics have matured. With SAS 9.2, GTL and SG procedures were a new direction for creating analytical graphs in SAS. The motivation and design of the GTL framework and the SG procedures was driven primarily by the needs of the procedure writers within SAS to enable the automatic creation
SAS Server Pages were initially described in my SAS Press book Building Web Applications with SAS/IntrNet: A Guide to the Application Dispatcher . The creation of SAS Server Pages was accomplished through the use of a DATA step and the RESOLVE function. SAS Server Pages have been used by a
Chances are you have at least one paper or research project this semester. If you are using SAS as part of a project, there are some great student scholarship opportunities to allow you to attend a SAS users group conference this year. You can present your work and build your
I can’t believe all that has happened in the 7 months since I last blogged about high-performance analytics, so I’m back to give you some updates from SAS R&D. The energy around this area keeps growing as more of our developers adopt the new high-performance architecture and target their developments
At the IFSUG conference this week in Cary, NC I met Stephen Harris from Bank of America. Stephen gave the talk "Manage Your Partners Before You Manage Your Dashboards: Designing Great Dashboards" covering the business aspects of successfully implementing dashboards. When you back up for a second to consider the
As a SAS developer, I am always looking ahead to the next release of SAS. However, many SAS customer sites migrate to new releases slowly and are just now adopting versions of SAS that were released in 2010 or 2011. Consequently, I want to write a few articles that discuss
About once a month, a customer approaches SAS and asks a question of significance. By "significance", I don't necessarily mean "of great importance", but instead I mean "of how SAS handles large numbers, or floating-point values with many significant digits". In response, we always first ask why they asked. This
When I read the way that this user is working with SAS, I took a look around support.sas.com to find examples to allow you to work with your own data. (Take a look at this.) If this example isn't quite right for you, plug in your own key words.
Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples by Tricia Aanderud and Angela Hall just published this month. This highly anticipated book—called “a must read for anyone using SAS® BI”* —is a quick-start guide that will help users move quickly from using only one of the SAS BI Clients to
Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember
Many of the chapters in my new book Building Business Intelligence Using SAS: Content Development Examples were straightforward to write but one in particular was the beast. Neither Tricia nor I wanted to tackle the SAS BI Dashboard chapter. Just chalk it up to no major work experience with this
As many of you have already noticed, my LinkedIn profile and the blog profile blurb have changed. I took on an exciting new job in the SAS Solutions OnDemand team. The official title is Software Development Manager, but what I really do is lead a team of fraud solution architects.
Lots of the visitors to this blog arrive here by way of Google search (welcome!). Thanks to search engines and a few well placed keywords, the same older posts (let's call them "timeless topics") seem to attract the most traffic from year to year. I hope that the searchers find
OLAP cube developers might have noticed that the amount of time required to generate any aggregation (including the NWAY) can negatively impact their productivity. Developers remove the NWAY aggregation (following the sample screens in a prior post) to significantly reduce build time and allow quick modifications to the cube definition.
Functionality to upload files onto the SAS server (from 9.2 on) is available using stored processes and an html input type="file". I introduced this topic last year in my blog post using the SAS Stored Process Developer Guide sample. Of course, it is never as easy as the sample is
SAS superstar Rick Wicklin and his book Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software inspired this week’s SAS author’s tip. Besides earning stellar reviews from SAS users, Rick is one of those highly productive people who stands out in whatever role he’s undertaking—from senior research statistician developer at SAS to developer of
Every six months or so I try to find a recent picture that captures who I am and what I am feeling. Loading this into my various social/online profiles in Twitter, SAS Community, Forums, LinkedIn, corporate internal, Facebook etc then take me a bit of time to implement. Wouldn't it
Filed under "Little changes that you probably didn't notice". When Microsoft introduced Windows 7 to the desktop, one of the many usability features that they added were "Jump Lists". Jump Lists serve as a sort of shortcut to not just open an application, but "jump right in" to a particular
Today, I came across this article that discusses how software users rarely change the settings in the applications that they use. Users assume that the software vendor sets the default values as they are for a reason, and who are they to set them otherwise? I'm a software developer (and
One of the sweet new capabilities in 9.2 OLAP for cube developers is the Cube Job that is automatically created for each new cube. The job is used as a interface mechanism to schedule the cube refresh code without manually retrieving the PROC OLAP code and customizing it for scheduling which we "old"
New in 9.3, stored processes can be assigned to run on the 'Default Server' server type. Developers can still force the stored process to run on only one server type but choosing the 'Default Server' allows the client application to specifically call the best server type to run on. Another cool
