All Posts
When I travel to San Francisco in April for SAS Global Forum 2013, it will make my 12th time to attend the international SAS users group conference, and my 7th consecutive year. A lot of people assume that I automatically go every year, but the truth is that SAS employees
I wanted to write a blog post about the "Table distribution" in SAS. The Table distribution, which is supported by the RAND and the RANDGEN function, enables you to specify the probability of selecting each of k items. Therefore you can use the Table distribution to sample, with replacement, from
Die Menschen sagen immer, man könnt nichts lernen aus Hollywood-Filmen. Stimmt nicht! Im Kino läuft gerade „Gangster Squad“. Die Handlung: Ein stadtbekannter Verbrecher ist nicht mit den gängigen Methoden zu fangen. Daher rottet sich eine rabiatere Polizei-Truppe zusammen, um ihn zu bekämpfen. Das hört sich zwar spannend an, aber mein Lieblings-Film
How many analytical projects have foundered due to lack of problem definition and other soft skills? As my SAS colleague Sascha Schubert writes, people and process matter, in addition to great technology. Great technology is a great first step, but having the right people following the right process is critically important.
This week's tip is from Gerhard Svolba and his book Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS. Gerhard is a product manager and pre-sales consultant at SAS in Austria, where he specializes in analytics and customer intelligence. Visit his author page to learn more about him and his work. The following excerpt is
This technical case study by Faisal Dosani, Royal Bank of Canada; Lisa Eckler, Lisa Eckler Consulting Inc.; and Marje Fecht, Prowerk Consulting Ltd., discusses the steps to develop a hands-off process for creating flexible and extensible solutions that avoid maintainability issues and enable speed to market of results. Building reusable
We had some fierce wind storms all across the United States yesterday, which even spawned some tornadoes! It looks like we weathered the storm OK here in Cary (but I still need to run out to the lake and make sure my pontoon/houseboat is still there, agh!). Anyway ... as with other
In my previous article on Adverse Event Timeline Graph, I wrote about how to create the AE timeline using SAS 9.2 code, using VECTOR plot and the MARKERCHAR option in SCATTER plot. I described a better way to place the labels at the lower end of the vectors. SAS 9.3 provides an easier way
Warum ist Visualisierung ein so wichtiges Thema - gerade jetzt? Und warum ist Analytics eine so wichtige Komponente, sozusagen die zweite Seite der Medaille? Eine Annäherung in drei Schritten: 1. Visualisierung Die Ausgangsüberlegung ist simpel: Ein Bild sagt mehr als tausend Worte. Mit einer aussagekräftigen Grafik lassen sich viele Informationen
I've got a new trick that you can use to track progress in a long-running SAS program, while using SAS Enterprise Guide. I've previously written about the SYSECHO statement and how you can use it to update the Task Status window with custom messages. SYSECHO is a "global" statement in
Over the holidays I was having a discussion with my cat, Ms. Trixie Lou. A question that often arises during the first programming class is the following: how do I find the variables that are in common to these two or three data sets? As it turns out, Ms. Trixie
I think most people would agree that there's not much point in locking your front door if you're going to leave the keys in the lock. With a SAS platform metadata security implementation, it is just as important to ensure that the metadata access controls that you have carefully put
The SAS/IML language secretly creates temporary variables. Most of the time programmers aren't even aware that the language does this. However, there is one situation where if you don't think carefully about temporary variables, your program will silently produce an error. And as every programmer knows, silent wrong numbers are
Often it is desirable to use special Unicode characters for the tick value names on the axes. However, SG procedures and GTL do not support Unicode strings in SAS data sets. With SAS 9.3, the SGPLOT procedure supports annotation which does support Unicode strings. You can create an annotation data set
Windows 8 was officially released Friday October 26. This was Microsoft’s first operating system release since the introduction of Apple’s iPad and the subsequent surge in popularity of tablets. To align their OS with the new computing devices, Windows 8 has two interfaces to allow access from traditional desktops and laptops and