Christina Harvey is an editor for SAS External Communications. She has more than 20 years experience as a technical writer and communications specialist for SAS.
Hadoop, in-memory analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, data visualization— topics that are dominating the analytics airwaves. SAS is innovating in all these areas, rapidly developing new products and functionality to meet the needs of today’s analytic environment. During this year’s Technology Connection session, SAS Global Forum 2015
Every college and university seems to have its own unique version of “The Quad”, where folks mingle and serious (and more often less serious!) happenings are staged. At SAS Global Forum, The Quad is the former SAS Support and Demo area, freshened up with today’s casual atmosphere, more interactive spaces
Many experienced and novice SAS programmers take advantage of the power of a “language within a language” offered by PROC SQL, SAS/IML and the SAS Macro Facility. But how many of you are aware of recently added languages and techniques? These newer tools are designed to help SAS programmers leverage
Last week, Sara Jones shared a list of sample session agendas designed to help you build your personal SAS Global Forum 2015 schedule. But what if there are other areas of interest or topics you’d like to focus on? This is the first in a series of blog posts that
I’m not a seasoned business traveler so I generally plan to arrive extra early and leave a little late to avoid any last-minute stress. The problem with all that stress-avoidance is that I often have extra time on my hands and am stuck with finding ways to entertain myself. What
Recently, I spoke with Sally Carson about the Junior Professional Award, a SAS Global Forum 2015 program for people who have used SAS three years or less. The award offers free registration, free training and lots of opportunity to learn and become involved. This is the third year that Junior
I spend a lot of time on support.sas.com looking for resources to share. The SAS Programmer’s Bookshelf is a handy reference that’s been around for a while, so I asked “Why not a SAS Administrator’s Bookshelf?” What would you include? It’s complicated, of course, because the SAS administrator’s role covers
Really! I did a double-take last week when a conference chair told me that there’s grant money available for students, faculty and SAS junior professionals but few have applied. In one case, there were no applications submitted. We're hoping this is just a temporary glitch, a holdup resulting from too-busy schedules
The call for papers is open for all 2014 US regional users conferences. A few deadlines are just around the corner, and you won’t want to miss them! WUSS 2014 – May 5 SESUG 2014 — May 19 MWSUG 2014 — June 13 SCSUG 2014 — June 30 Spring is a difficult time
The SAS Users Groups Leaders meet-up was scheduled for the last evening of SAS Global Forum 2014, sandwiched between the last of the Tuesday presentations and the Kick-Back Party later that evening. There were a few familiar faces from regional users groups but lots of new ones from local and
You’d think life would be calmer after the high energy of SAS Global Forum. Not so here at SAS! Your feedback is THE most crucial element of the conference for SAS teams, and we’ll be spending the next few weeks digesting it, choosing the best method for implementing it and
Well, if I were asked to name the most intriguing spot in the SAS Support and Demo Area, it would probably be The Catalyst Café sponsored by SAS R&D. This exciting new area at SAS Global Forum 2014 is aptly name: a informal meeting place dedicated to jump-starting ideas for
In December, Kathy Council gave us the scoop on the consolidation of several divisions at SAS into a single organization focused on customer support. At this morning’s 2014 Technology Connection, Fritz Lehman, Vice President of SAS Customer Engagement and Support, shared his vision by responding to some of your requests
Every year, conference organizers get this same request “I want to attend a SAS conference, but my travel funds are limited, what do you recommend?” This seems like a good opportunity to share some of the clever ways this year’s SAS conference leaders are helping you save on SAS Global
Hopefully, you’ve listened to SAS Global Forum 2014 Conference Chair Marje Fecht talk about the focus on content at this year’s conference. The Conference Scheduler is central to achieving that goal, helping you easily find and schedule the presentations, tutorials and activities that meet your needs and interests. In this
Software performance is a complex topic. The answer to every question depends—depends on hardware, depends on operating system, architecture, time of day, number of users and so on. (Margaret Crevar gave us some insight into that complexity in her January 2013 post Improving performance: Understand the problem.) That’s why we
Welcome to the SAS administrator blog series for 2014! Back in early 2013, the most popular posts on the SAS Users Groups blog were all about the roles and responsibilites of SAS administrators. I was reminded of them during a presentation at WUSS 2013 in Las Vegas. Carey Smoak of
My family always travels over the winter holiday so I spend lots of time planning to be away. My desk is littered with lists and notes. Things to do now. Things I mustn’t forget for next year. Special events and dates. Holiday schedules. Important bits of information to share with
. . . getting to know all about you! Everyone says it—getting to know other SAS users is the best part of a SAS conference. The other “best part” are the resources available in the exhibits and demo areas. I’d have to agree. Well, this year’s organizers at the 2013
Stick to the basics. Did you ever get that advice? Two of the papers at MidWest SAS Users Group 2013 used that most fundamental of SAS processing concepts—the Program Data Vector—to show why users might encounter unexpected errors in their DATA step programs. In The Secret Life of DATA STEP,
In SAS Grid Manager environments, SAS administrators must often set up separate configurations based on a mix of requirements for departments, client applications and user roles. To accomplish this in previous SAS releases, administrators must define multiple SAS Application Server contexts, each with its own grid server definition and associated options.
Congratulations to Best Paper Winners from MidWest SAS Users Group conference! You'll want to read these, and check the MWSUG 2013 proceedings for other useful papers from the recent conference. Start planning now for MWSUG 2014 in Chicago.
Do your SAS programs read extra-large volumes of data? Do they run multiple DATA steps and procedures one after the other for hours at a time? Two papers from MWSUG 2013 show how you can speed up those long-running SAS jobs. Although their approaches and environments differed, both authors made
Although she’s an analyst, Anca Tilea estimates that she spends 80% of her time cleaning data. Tilea and co-author Deanna Chyn shared seven of their favorite methods for checking, cleaning and restructuring data. Attendees at MWSUG 2013 got a bonus tip: Ask SAS peers in one of the SAS Support
I’m here at MWSUG 2013 soaking up the regional experience. After spending a couple of days in Columbus, I’m seeing first-hand how much users care about working with SAS software and about being part of the SAS community. It’s been a great conference so far—-presentations are packed! Walking through the
My family are all Lord of the Rings Trilogy fans. As a novice in the world of SAS administration, I find discussing the SAS middle tier architecture a little like traveling through Middle Earth. For me, it’s new and fascinating terrain. And like other travelers, I would find it useful
One of our readers asked if we could explain some of the thinking behind SAS’ recent decision to modify its support for US regional users groups. Over the past five to ten years, users have been telling SAS they need more targeted, more local and more immediate types of support, especially technical
Some handy folks at SAS got together and created a series of videos to help you get started with the SAS 9.4 installation. It starts with the basics that explain what you should do with your Software Order Email. Step two provides videos for creating or moving the software depot.
Over the past few releases, SAS has offered high availability for servers through various failover techniques. So I’ve been wondering how metadata clustering differs and why does SAS 9.4 provide it. The “why” is an easy question to answer. Today’s SAS software is used in a wide array of business-critical applications
An updated version of the SAS Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SASHFADD) has just been released on the SAS Technical Support Hot Fix site. If you are not familiar with SASHFADD (pronounced SAS-H-F-ADD), it’s a tool that will analyze a SAS 9.2, SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.4 deployment
