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Subtitle: An accounting of accounts which, by all accounts, you should hold accountable. With the introduction of the SAS metadata server for use with SAS Business Intelligence, the role of the SAS administrator became more important. In SAS 9.1.3 a number of new standard "accounts" -- user IDs that serve
Today my colleague Alison Bolen, Editor of sascom magazine, sent me this link to an interesting piece on NPR: "Can Economic Forecasting Predict The Future?" In a somewhat lighthearted take on the inability of our economists to predict the future -- or even precisely report the past for that matter
Although I would like to flatter myself and believe that my readers rely solely on The BFD for all their business forecasting news and information, I realize this is not the case. While other sources may not be as honest, useful, or delightfully entertaining to young and old alike, they
Constance Korol oversees the Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning group on LinkedIn. (No, she isn’t the meaner one I will be referring to, but she can swing a nasty rolling pin if you get out of line.) This week Constance posted a Wall Street Journal article “Follow the Tweets,”
I’m going to put “An Operational Definition of ‘Demand’ – Part 3” on hold for a moment, to announce a new favorite article on forecasting, “Living in a world of low levels of predictability,” by Spyros Makridakis and Nassim Taleb (International Journal of Forecasting 25 (2009) 840-844. IJF is a
If you're accustomed to using "shell" commands from within your SAS programs (using the X command or SYSTASK statement, for example), you'll find that those statements won't work when you run your program from within SAS Enterprise Guide. When you try them, you will probably see one of the following
In the last post I argued that we don’t have a sure way to measure true (i.e. “unconstrained”) demand. While demand is commonly defined as “what the customer wants, and when they want it,” it is actually a nebulous concept. For a manufacturer, what a customer orders is not the
Sorry about not getting a post out last week, but I spent a good part of it cowering under my desk in fear. The SAS Security office issued a warning that there were wild coyotes roaming the campus, and I was having post-traumatic flashbacks to a painful encounter I once
It is definitely easier to force single selections for prompts used in SAS Stored Processes, however it isn't very usable when the majority of users need to select multiple values. For example, let us say we create a prompt for region (called 'region_prompt') and then use that in the query
Last week I was a guest of Gaurav Verma on the SAS Applying Business Analytics Web Series, and presented “What Management Must Know About Forecasting.” One of the most important things you can bring to management’s attention is the benefit of making your demand forecastable. In forecasting we tend to
I was struggling with a calculated member that completes a distinctcount of members in a dimension, the performance was simply unacceptable. After attempting several other measures such as count(), processing changes on the source data, etc, I sent out a msg on Twitter asking for advice. Once again, why aren't
There are some things about forecasting that you may only discover by being a forecaster. Simply managing a forecasting process, or being a downstream consumer of the forecast, isn't always enough. If you have something to say to your management about forecasting, but would rather avoid the confrontation, maybe we
Graduate and undergraduate students are eligible to apply for the SAS Student Ambassador Program, which covers the cost of travel expenses and registration fees paid to attend SAS Global Forum 2010. What’s the “catch?” You must complete an application and submit a presentation abstract and working draft by midnight October
A user who is a member of the "SAS Administrators" group and has been granted the role "Management Console: Advanced" can create a Metadata Backup job via SAS 9.2 Management Console. Right Click on 'Backup and Restore' Task under 'Metadata Utilities'. Then select the Backup task created and choose either
The SAS 9.2 XML engine is very very very slick. I created an xml map to generate a dataset from xml generated during a metadata getobjects job to then run call execute statements for a proc metalib update. "Wait, you did what??!@#?&" you ask? Here are my simple steps. This