Gerhard Svolba is one of our busiest authors. His new book Data Quality for Analytics Using SAS just released and next Monday, June 18, he's participating in a live e-chat at 11 a.m. ET. In the meantime, I decided to feature our weekly SAS tip from Gerhard's first and also highly-regarded book Data Preparation
After some discussion with SAS Product Marketing yesterday, we devised this response to everyone's question about the Business Analytic differentiator that SAS provides. ********************************************************************************************************* Business Intelligence is one of the key components from SAS that ties into a suite of analytic techniques, information handling and performance infrastructures needed to deliver
Although many of you may not own up to it, I bet you watched at least one episode of Dallas in the early ‘80s. I haven’t yet seen the reboot of the series, but plan to. Dallas’ “Who Shot JR?” plotline, as well as the contrived writing-off of an entire
A colleague was recently working with a web service that supplies some datetime values using the Microsoft Windows internal representation. He called the web service to retrieve those values (along with other data) from SAS, and he needed convert these values to SAS date-time values. The Microsoft definition for a
When I was growing up, summertime always meant a road trip to see my grandparents and great-grandparents in Concord, California, just outside San Francisco. Most of our time in Concord was spent shuffling between relatives but my parents always made time for a day trip into San Francisco. On these
Questions (or search strings) lead people to my blog or my email box on a daily basis and many of these are related to what SAS Stored Processes can or cannot do. Can a SAS Stored Process query an RDBMS? Can a SAS Stored Process create a data table? Could
SAS customers are both bright and generous. Recently, I met several who gathered to discuss SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Model Manager predictive analytics and data mining software. Hiring the best I loved listening to their discussion on what they look for and how they find the people who will
It is exciting and overwhelming when you first get new software for information management, reporting and analytics. This is especially true once your users first get their hands on the data and new reports. I recall first hand when I was a system engineer and had been with SAS for
Six user import and synchronization macros are available in the SAS Foundation directory, these are documented as available in creating programs to retrieve information and compare authentication provider (such as LDAP) account information with what is stored in SAS Metadata to then synchronize the two. Try this code in BASE
A collegue who works with time series sent me the following code snippet. He said that the calculation was overflowing and wanted to know if this was a bug in SAS: data A(drop=m); call streaminit(12345); m = 2; x = 0; do i = 1 to 5000; x = m*x
Last Friday morning I took a meeting with SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. Despite the hassle, I was happy to rearrange my busy schedule to squeeze him in. Ha! Just a little joke there about my inflated sense of importance! Actually, the meeting was part of a regular series called "Conversations
A common question really and one that I get after posting code like yesterday's All SAS Stored Process Locations Report. The neat trick is just to type METABROWSE in a BASE SAS command window. (There are two other commands: METACON and METAFIND. Has anyone got any tips on when those
Have you ever seen question marks in ODS output, diamonds with question marks in them where a copyright symbol should be, or unexpected symbols in your Web browser? In other words, do you sometimes see garbage instead of text? Manfred Kiefer’s new book, SAS Encoding: Understanding the Details can help.
Or... just because you saw "The Hunger Games," are you good at archery? As the first waves of the "digital generation" enter the workforce, does their inherent technology skillset transfer directly into job-related tasks? This question has important implications for the 21st century classroom. Today's beginning teachers bring with them
Stored process code can exist within the metadata itself for version 9.3 (the benefits of which I discussed earlier). But for all other versions (and as a option in version 9.3) the SAS code is stored as a .sas file within the server's file system (or mapped folder/drive structure). When editing
As SAS users, you rely on books from SAS to stay informed about the latest software updates and industry best practices from SAS authors. As the organization that brings you those books, Publications Division employees attend trade shows, conferences and workshops for professional development and meet with publishing partners to
The date prompt from SAS Prompt Framework provides the options of single selection or a range, however what if you need to select multiple individual dates such as Monday (May 28), Wednesday (May 30), and Friday (June 1) of last week? There are a few alternatives to accomplishing this. Option
If you are like many SAS Enterprise Guide users, you've amassed a large collection of project files (EGP files) that contain important content: programs, logs, notes, results, and more. However, to most tools and processes, the EGP file is opaque. That is, you can't see what's inside of it unless
This week's %NLINMIX macro tips come from the esteemed authors of SAS for Mixed Models, Second Edition. Ramon C. Littell, George A. Milliken, Walter W. Stroup, Russell D. Wolfinger, and Oliver Schabenberger combined their expertise to write this indispensable guide. This 800 page book has made a big impact in the user community
Did you change your LinkedIn password yesterday? (If you didn’t, you should!) But did it happen to be the same as your corporate password? First, tisk tisk. Second, change your corporate password NOW! Ok, now that this is done ~ don’t let your saved connection profile for SAS applications lock
For the last three years, doing more with less has been a constant rallying call that one could argue has become the new normal within business. Within the realms of the marketing department, it means generating the same or higher revenues from smaller budgets; fewer staff to execute the same
What if you would like to make a copy of an existing stored process to test out your changes before making them live? The copy command is available from within SAS Management Console or from the SAS Enterprise Guide Open Stored Process GUI as seen below (note you can only
"Help! My simulation is taking too long to run! How can I make it go faster?" I frequently talk with statistical programmers who claim that their "simulations are too slow" (by which they mean, "they take too long"). They suspect that their program is inefficient, but they aren't sure why.
We are pleased to announce that a couple of SAS documentation projects recently won Awards of Merit in the Society for Technical Communication’s (STC) 2012 International Summit Awards. Competition at the international level is tough. Before reaching this level, documentation projects must receive either an Award of Excellence or an
Fraud detection presents myriad analytical challenges: gathering sufficient known cases to make typical modeling techniques possible, gathering inputs from disparate data sources, and combining expert knowledge from investigators with findings to be gleaned from the data in an efficient way. Of course, analysts can fall into the trap of thinking
We asked David Chong, an SVP of marketing at a leading Malaysian Bank to talk to us about where they are focused today and tomorrow. There may be lots of data out there, and ever increasing forms of technology to tame and mine that data, but according to David, banks
It's been two years since my first trip to SAS UK for the SAS Professionals Convention. That was also my first trip to the UK, ever. I was pretty naive back then and didn't know what to expect from this strange land and its people. I was shown tremendous hospitality
Benchmarks of forecasting performance are available from several sources, including professional organizations and journals, academic research, and private consulting/benchmarking organizations. But there are several reasons why industry forecasting benchmarks should not be used for setting your own forecasting performance objectives. 1) Can you trust the data? Are the numbers based
Ed says the great jobs of tomorrow will be in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. There’s a strong demand for graduates in those fields. That’s why it is critically important for all of our young people to get a solid education in math and science. Kareem Dale,
I recently read a blog post in which a SAS user had to rename a bunch of variables named A1, A2,..., A10, such as are contained in the following data set: /* generate data with variables A1-A10 */ data A; array A[10] A1-A10 (1); do i = 1 to 10;
