This SAS Jedi is very excited about the SAS 9.4 M4 release, which brought many wonderful gifts just in time for Christmas. So in the interest of extending the Christmas spirit, I'm going to blog about some of my favorites! I've long loved the SAS DO statement variant which allows
In the previous three blogs in this series, we talked about what metadata can be available from source systems, transformation and movement, and operational usage. For this final blog in the series, I want to discuss the analytical usage of metadata. Let’s set up the scenario. Let's imagine I'm a
Die Digitalisierung wird ja angeblich alles ändern. Oder sogar revolutionieren. Das gilt sowohl für unser Privat- wie auch das Berufsleben. Unsere Arbeitsweisen und Gewohnheiten werden sich an die digitale Gesellschaft anpassen. Ob wir wollen oder nicht. Gleichfalls werden sich Strukturen und Organisationsformen in Unternehmen verändern. Und diese Veränderungen machen auch
How can you generate data that contains outliers in a simulation study? The contaminated normal distribution is a simple but useful distribution you can use to simulate outliers. The distribution is easy to explain and understand, and it is also easy to implement in SAS. What is a contaminated normal
SAS temporary arrays are an underutilized jewel in the SAS toolbox. I find that many beginning to intermediate SAS programmers are not familiar with temporary arrays. The good news is that there is nothing complicated about them and they are very useful. First of all, what is a temporary array?
It’s no secret that the US energy landscape has undergone massive changes in recent years: the emergence of cost-effective renewables, the natural gas revolution, the wide-scale penetration of intelligence across energy delivery networks, and soon a new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. All of these changes are impacting different pockets of
It's that time of year again. Holidays, parties, gifts, cooking, closing annual business, hitting targets and preparing for 2017. Looking back on the year for the communication and media industries, it has been a year of transition for the industry and for many of the customers I work with in my role
Es ist momentan viel die Rede von Digitalisierung. Dabei wird die Zukunft beschrieben, in der fast alle Informationen in digitaler Form vorliegen, was unser Leben und Arbeiten maßgeblich beeinflussen wird. Aber leben wir nicht schon längst in einer digitalen Welt, ohne es bemerkt zu haben? Ich habe mir dazu ein
TL; DR Free training from SAS: "SAS Programming for R Users." Check the available Live Web offerings and register for one that fits your schedule. Or use the free e-Learning version and learn at your own pace. The complete course materials are on the SAS Software GitHub space and you
In my last post we started looking at the issue of identifier proliferation, in which different business applications assigned their own unique identifiers to data representing the same entities. Even master data management (MDM) applications are not immune to this issue, particularly because of the inherent semantics associated with the
The utility industry is ripe with analytic opportunities. Usually, when I share that perspective, thoughts immediately jump to making the energy grid more efficient. Certainly, there are efficiencies to gain with improved data about where power is being consumed and the sources that are available to support it. However, there
In einen glühenden Schlund blicke ich, als öffne sich eine Höllenpforte; Hitze schlägt mir entgegen: Aus dem Stoßofen wird eine Stahlbramme geschoben, zum Walzen auf etwa 1.250 Grad Celsius erwärmt. Lärmend und zischend wird der Stahlblock ausgewalzt und schließlich als wenige Millimeter dickes Blechband aufgerollt, eine gewaltige Spule, tonnenschwer …
Editor's note: This series of blogs addresses the questions we are most frequently asked at SAS Press! Do you have a great book idea already in mind, or think you might want to write about an analytics or industry topic? Consider writing a SAS Press book or a SAS &
Unless you live in England, you may not have seen the recent announcement that Buckingham Palace is to undergo a 10-year refurbishment costing the British taxpayer £369M. Even with the post-Brexit devaluation of Sterling, that’s still a sizable spend representing nearly US$500 million. The Queen will remain in residence during
Are you a visualization & graphing expert? Can you identify which tool (R, Excel, Tableau, SPSS, Matlab, JS, Python, or SAS) was used to create each of these graphs? No cheating! I recently read Tim Matteson's blog where he presented 18 graphs, and had his readers try to guess which
I find I am so busy these days, I do all of my holiday shopping online. I set aside an hour, a glass of wine and my credit card, and I get the gifts ordered. The must-have gift for this year was a Dyson hair dryer. When the first site
As states build systems to evaluate the effectiveness of educator preparation programs, they must first know what “effectiveness” looks like. Are the characteristics of the candidates in the program, such as high school GPA, ACT or SAT score, or other admissions criteria, the most important indicators? What about the curriculum
As I discussed in the first two blogs of this series, metadata is useful in a variety of ways. Its importance starts at the source system, and continues through the data movement and transformation processes and into operations. Operational metadata, in particular, gives us information about the execution and completion
I am writing this post with the satisfaction of having Implementing CDISC Using SAS: An End-to-End Guide, Second Edition completed and on the shelf. Once again, it was my pleasure to collaborate with Chris Holland, and I am glad that we had a chance to update the book with current
Data governance seems to be the hottest topic at data-related conferences this year, and the question I get asked most often is, “where do we start?” Followed closely by how do we do it, what skills do we need, how do we convince the rest of the organisation to get
Let me make this clear right from the start: I needed to answer 44 of the 62 exam questions correctly to earn my BASE SAS Programmer certification, and I got exactly 44 right. No margin of error. I never thought I’d be proud of a 70%, but I’m more than
In some applications, you need to optimize a linear objective function of many variables, subject to linear constraints. Solving this problem is called linear programming or linear optimization. This article shows two ways to solve linear programming problems in SAS: You can use the OPTMODEL procedure in SAS/OR software or
"Two weeks to go," Santa said to himself, with millions of toys stacked up on the shelves. Each year worry hit at the same time – "How do I get the right toy to the right child without losing my mind?" Though Old St. Nick didn't have a computer science degree, deep down
I recently met Mrs. Claus at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, where we got to talking about the social network analysis session she’d just attended. It turns out Mrs. Claus and I are both fans of a book by Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Apparently
During a data quality assessment, one of my clients discovered that a large chunk of data that ultimately fed into their business analytics engine was sourced externally. After examining the contracts surrounding this data, I found that 100% of it failed to possess service-level agreements (SLAs) for the quality of
Ready for another (soon to be classic) fun, custom-made for IT holiday jingle?? Fire up the hot chocolate, gather around the water cooler and belt this one out at the upcoming office party: Have a holly, jolly smart grid It's about time we upgraded our electric infrastructure I don't know
“Analytics” and “data scientist” aren’t new terms, but they are trending buzzwords. The popularity of these concepts has created a false impression: Analytics are mysterious abstractions that can only be decoded if you have a white lab coat and an advanced degree in computer science. The reality couldn’t be more different.
Karen, in unserem letzten Gespräch haben wir über die Bedeutung von professionellem Datenqualitäts-Management und über die erforderliche organisatorische Einbettung gesprochen. Jetzt möchte ich etwas konkreter werden. Beschreibe doch mal, worauf es bei der Umsetzung ankommt? Wie sollte sich ein solcher Data Governance Prozess gestalten?
I was surprised to learn recently that despite the reams of laws and policies directing the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) across industries and government agencies, more than 50 million Medicare beneficiaries were issued cards with a Medicare Beneficiary Number that's based on their Social Security Number (SSN). That's
Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow. "Snow-flakes" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Happy holidays to all my readers! In my last post I showed
