+Chris Hemedinger is the Director of SAS User Engagement, which includes our SAS Communities and SAS User Groups. Since 1993, Chris has worked for SAS as an author, a software developer, an R&D manager and a consultant. Inexplicably, Chris is still coasting on the limited fame he earned as an author of SAS For Dummies.
A reader from Bejing commented on a recent post with a question about data lengths and formats. While that wasn't really related to my post, I thought I'd attempt to answer in a new entry, here. The question is basically this: when I combine two data sets with a common-named
Hot off the reel, the SAS for Dummies podcast is now available. Tune in now and hear the juicy tidbits of the story behind the book. Okay, it's no E! True Hollywood Story, but it's as exciting as I get without being on fire. P.S. Shelly Goodin from SAS Press
In a recent Dr. Dobb's Journal piece, Jim Starkey (senior architect for MySQL ) acknowledges that it's time to embed the power of applications within databases, instead of the other way around. Jim says (italics added by me): I think we can agree that context switches or network round trips
Our SAS usage notes usually do a great job of matching symptoms to solutions. But good old SAS note 10751 really stretches the limits of logic. The symptom: a message during the SAS 8.2 setup process that says "string variable is not large enough for string". The solution: "To circumvent
SAS tip-meister Phil Mason shares a veritable cornucopia of tips at the CMG 2007 conference. Check it out, and learn how a healthy diet of flexible DATE formats can keep your Perl expressions regular.
Today was "career day" in my daughter's 3rd grade classroom. A few privileged parents were invited to attend and answer questions about their professions, press-conference style. Among those on a panel of nine parents, the panelists that saw the most action included the Dog Trainer, the Duke Life Flight Nurse,
Congratulations to the support.sas.com team for a successful update to the SAS customer support center. I hope you'll agree with me that the new look is clean and attractive, and I think you'll find the site is easier to use now. I have the privilege of participating on the committee
During his bettermanagement.com seminar on Monday, Super Crunchers author Ian Ayres suggested that high school students would be better served by acquiring a modest knowledge of statistics rather than learning more abstract math topics, such as calculus. (Then again, if we don't favor calculus how will we ever arrive at
I've recently read Super Crunchers, the book by Ian Ayres that I blogged about a few weeks ago. Even though no propers are paid to SAS (I mean, why should the world's largest privately held software company and a leader in analytics get a mention in a book about the
In his blog, Jared details the hoops one must jump through to convince SAS to run system shell commands (such as the X command and SYSTASK) from SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is the explanation: SAS Enterprise Guide is a client application, and SAS runs as a server application. When launched
"Cut him in half and count the number of rings?" Some folks on the discussion forum share a better method to calculate someone's age from SAS Enterprise Guide.
If you deploy the SAS 9 environment on Windows, you may have multiple SAS processes running on a single box (metadata process, OLAP server, multiple workspace servers). Windows Task Manager doesn't provide a great way to distinguish one sas.exe process from another, but Process Explorer does. Process Explorer lets you
For the third year running, SAS spellers have prevailed at the Corporate Spelling Bee, held for the benefit of the Literacy Council of Wake County. In addition to showing their spelling skills, team members are encouraged to wear costumes to convey their team spirit. I've never seen a SAS for
My new favorite typeface for programming is Consolas, a font designed for use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I use it there, but I now also use it for SAS programming. It uses ClearType technology, so the "crisp and clean" benefits kick in only when you have ClearType smoothing enabled.
A colleague asked me to run a certain SAS program and then try to view the output in SAS Enterprise Guide. The output contained an SQL VIEW, and darn it, the application refused to open it, reporting only that the data "could not be opened." There was nothing wrong with
A new book brings into pop culture a concept that we've already known for years: that is, governments and corporations use data mining and analysis to influence our lives in major and minor ways. While Super Crunchers author Ian Ayres might not mention SAS by name (actually, I don't know
My new license plate arrived the other day, embossed with my personalized tag of "SASDUMMY". I used the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles web site to help select the plate and verify that this tag was available. Apparently there aren't many self-deprecating SAS programmers roaming around I-40. If you
It was about eight months ago that I wrote the first draft of "Setting It All Up", Chapter 15 of SAS for Dummies. There is some pressure to be clever when organizing these chapters for a Dummies book, and to be creative when crafting section headings and figure captions. Our
This January 2007 report from eWeek states that specialized skill shortages will swell IT salaries. According to that article, "demand in the software development area will include Business Objects, Java, [Microsoft] developers, SAS programmers and systems architects." (Bold added by me.) I guess their crystal ball is pretty good, because
Let's say you use SAS Report format, the latest tagset supported by ODS. After all, it's the lingua franca of SAS BI applications, since it's also used by SAS Web Report Studio, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and SAS Enterprise Guide. You've discovered how to use the report builder in
In the SAS BI-ogsource, Angela posts some sample SAS code for updating library definitions using the METALIB procedure. SAS Enterprise Guide users can make use of a friendlier interface to do the same job. Now available for download, the Update Library Metadata task plugs right into SAS Enterprise Guide and
The SAS OnDemand for Academics offering has brought to light some tremendous resources for learning SAS, and you don't have to be a professor or student to take advantage of them. One such resource is the SAS Online Resources for Statistics Education. If you've wondered how to start using SAS
When Alison Bolen asked if I would consider hosting my own blog, as a "spin-off" from her informative sascom voices blog, I didn't hesitate. Spin-offs have a rich heritage in our media culture, and I am superpleased to be a Mork and Mindy to her Happy Days. (I would rather
SAS has a rich heritage in academia, and we know that lots of colleges (and even some high schools) use SAS to teach students statistics and research methods. Now SAS (the company) has made it easier for professors to offer courses that use SAS. This fall, SAS offers the SAS
Rhesus monkeys can figure out basic probabilities, according to this study. Now I suppose that given enough monkeys and time, they might even replace your forecasting department. But I wouldn't worry. They haven't even managed to come up with the works of Shakespeare yet.
