"What do you do when you first get a data set that's a billion rows long?" asks SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. "You want to play around with it." At dozens of SAS events over the last year, audience attendees have watched Goodnight do just that, quickly grabbing 1.15 billion records, selecting
I'm sure that most of you have seen the really cool interactive Baby Name Voyager, right? If not, go have a look and try it out (be sure to plug in your name, and the names in your family, and so on). Here's a screen-capture: That's a pretty cool application! ...
Our recent innovations into Data Visualisation have led us to be inundated and involved in lots of conversations with customers and prospects looking to benefit from the marriage of advanced analytics, visualisation, data management and simplicity. Greg and Minh delved into the benefits that this marriage can yield and why data visualisation should form an
I have previously written about how to use the "table" distribution to generate random values from a discrete probability distribution. For example, if there are 50 black marbles, 20 red marbles, and 30 white marbles in a box, the following SAS/IML program simulates random draws (with replacement) of 1,000 marbles:
David Loshin discusses master data model requirements.
Last month, I talked to Emmett Cox about finding time to write his Wiley and SAS Business Series book. Like Emmett, many of our authors were already tops in their field when they became a SAS Press author. Sanjay Matange, Senior Software Manager in SAS R&D, was already quite well-known
Suppose that you have a SAS/IML matrix and you want to set each element of a submatrix to zero (or any other value). There is a simple syntax that accomplishes this task. If you subscript a matrix and do not specify a row, it means "use all rows." So, for
This week's tip is from Michael Raithel and his classic book The Complete Guide to SAS Indexes. Michael has a wealth of SAS experience and is a frequent and sought-out speaker at SAS Global Forum and regional user group conferences. If you get the opportunity to hear him speak, don't
Recently, I was having lunch with a city council member who shared a litany of comments about the outstanding job the city and its staff does in all areas of city operations. She remarked on how little the public understands about all the city does and how efficiently it’s done.
It's Valentine's Day - a day widely associated with love, or at least as a day for acknowledging love. It's celebrated world-wide with offers of candies, flowers, poetry and many other ways to make it very clear how you feel. While observed around the world, Wikipedia notes that it's a working day in most countries. And
What are the odds of winning the lottery? This seems like a simple question (and yes, there is a simple answer), but there are a few technical details to work out first... Which lottery? Let's say the Powerball Lottery. When? The number of balls used in the Powerball lottery has
SAS is celebrating the International Year of Statistics. Thinking about the importance of statistics in our lives and in my professional life, takes me for a moment down memory lane. I came to SAS a LONG time ago because I had a Master’s degree in Statistics and SAS wanted someone
If you are like me, you've experienced the following frustration. You are reading the SAS/STAT documentation, trying to understand some procedure or option, when you find an example that is very similar to what you need. "Great," you think, "this example will help me understand how the SAS procedure works!"
John D. Cook shared a picture of "pretty squiggles" on his blog, as well as a prose description of the mathematics behind it. I'm more of a programmer than a mathematician, but I've attempted to transcribe his description into a SAS program. I used DATA step to generate the point
PROC DOCUMENT makes your life easier by giving you the freedom from the pre-determined order in which SAS stores procedure output. You can also label, manage, and search your output so that it is at your fingertips when you need it. You can learn what a DOCUMENT does and get
David Loshin explains the technical requirements for MDM/DW integration.
Suppose you have an old jalopy that's perfectly reliable. Your jalopy gets you where you wanna go: no frills; no drama. Do you trade your old wheels in for a racecar that accelerates like crazy and corners like it's on rails? Or stick with what's old and comfortable? Your choice
The title of this post comes by way of Benjamin Franklin sometime in the 18th century (Thanks, Ben.). Despite the age of this wisdom, the world is littered with examples of marketing efforts that have prepared for and executed against failure, often with spectacular results. Some of the most recent
February is one of my favorite months. Each year, I get to spend the last week of February in California, hanging out with my buds. It’s because the blind guy goes to this conference in San Diego dedicated to making life better for people with disabilities. A lot of blind
In linear algebra, the I symbol is used to denote an n x n identity matrix. The symbol J (or sometimes 1) is used to denote an n x p matrix of ones. When the SAS/IML language was implemented, the I function was defined to generate the identity matrix. The J function was defined
Netflix has made a big splash in the news with its use of big data. By analyzing millions of data points about the viewing habits of its customers, the movie delivery giant used the insight it gained to devise the "perfect show". One of the defining characteristics of the show,
This week's SAS tip is from Frederick Pratter and his book Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition. The many real-world examples in the book guide lend it to being frequently excerpted on this blog! Previously featured tips include: Formatting XML documents, Configuring TCP security, and SQL pass-through. The following excerpt is from SAS
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of Foresight Foresight has always presented its methods-based articles as either tutorials, which introduce and illustrate a methodology in nontechnical language, or as case studies, with a focus on the practical issues and challenges in generating forecasts. We lead off this issue with two practical issues articles. First, Stephan
If you’ve got a few minutes to chat with Marc Huber, don’t miss the opportunity. He has an interesting take on the human side of statistics. As a senior analytical training consultant for SAS, he combines an impressive background in psychology with a passion for math to teach customers around the
Compare it to predicting the economy. So concludes an ABC News Australia story by finance reporter Sue Lannin, entitled "Economic forecasts no better than a random walk." The story covers a recent apology by the International Monetary Fund over its estimates for troubled European nations, and an admission by the
Für einige der genannten Veranstaltungen haben wir ein kleines Kontingent an Freikarten: Bei Interesse bitte einfach anschreiben. Unter anderem ist SAS auf folgenden Events präsent:
I like to think that I have a graph for all occasions - Chinese New Year is no exception! ... The exact date of the Chinese New Year varies from year to year, because it's based on the lunar (moon) cycles. I thought it would be useful to create a
Last week the SAS Training Post blog posted a short article on an easy way to find variables in common to two data sets. The article used PROC CONTENTS (with the SHORT option) to print out the names of variables in SAS data sets so that you can visually determine
On advantage of being a marketer at SAS right now is that we have a roughly 35-year head start on our competitors in terms of helping organizations manage big data. And because much of big data is driven by customer data, marketing is ground zero for big data in most organizations.
If you happen to be in Raleigh, NC next Tuesday evening, please come out for the APICS Triangle Chapter professional development meeting, 6:00-8:00 pm. While I can't make any promises about the caliber of the evening's speaker (me), you are assured a good meal and good conversation with representatives from
