I've just read that Sony plans to discontinue the manufacture of 3.5-inch floppy disks. [Update: a more complete tribute to the floppy disk is over on Geek News Central.] The announcement made me nostalgic for the days when we shipped The SAS System on floppies. I don't think we've done
Little SAS Book author Susan Slaughter attended SAS Global Forum this year, as she always does. She had to travel to Seattle this time to get her hands on an early copy of her own new book, The Little SAS Book for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, which she updated with
The Spring 2010 issue of Foresight is now available. Here is Editor Len Tashman’s preview: What’s the connection between hindsight and foresight? That is the question Paul Goodwin asks in his Hot New Research column leading off this issue. The problem is that hindsight bias – the tendency to believe
Yesterday (Monday) was an incredibly busy day for me at SAS Global Forum. It began with a successful Technical Session where SAS R&D staffers showed off: the new features coming in SAS/STAT (with the 9.22 /nine-twenty-two/ release) SAS Enterprise Miner with the Rapid Predictive Modeler (hosted in SAS Enterprise Guide
I'll leave North Carolina early on Sunday morning to head to the SAS Global Forum venue in Seattle. Through the magic of time zones, I'll be in Seattle, WA before lunchtime. I don't expect my internal clock to adjust to Pacific time right away, so I'll be awake early on
When we published the first edition of SAS For Dummies a couple of years ago, we received feedback from readers around the topic of SAS programming. In the book's introduction, we stated that the book doesn't cover the SAS programming language, but that there are many other fine books that
...if man is still alive, will he be importing Excel spreadsheets and wondering why his leap years are off? I received this report from SAS Technical Support, on behalf of a customer who uses SAS Enterprise Guide to import spreadsheet data: The date "12/31/9999" will import as "02Jan****" when reading
Although you probably didn’t notice, I stepped away from this blog for the last two months to think about something more important: The current state of business forecasting. I’d come to realize there is a lot of animosity in the world of forecasting. We have advocates of statistics, and advocates
SAS For Dummies 2nd Edition is now available. It's not just more of the same -- it's got lots of cool new stuff in it too. It's completely updated for SAS 9.2. It's got a new chapter on data mining. And it's got a new chapter on SAS programming. I
Robert Springborn has a special relationship with his SAS software. Like many long-time SAS users, Robert’s livelihood depends upon his advanced skills with SAS technology, as well as his analytical expertise. He’s been using SAS for over 28 years, which means when it comes to writing SAS programs, he’s comfortable
Today, I had the privilege of speaking to a group of high school students at a community outreach event sponsored by the Human Resources division at SAS. Approximately 80 students from schools as far away as Charlotte came to visit SAS and hear about the impact that SAS and analytics
It's March, and in North Carolina all of the talk is about college basketball. At SAS, we like to brag about how these guys use SAS analytics to predict the NCAA "dance card" with astounding results. This year, the fun question revolves around conference bias and how it affects a
When you connect to a SAS environment with SAS Enterprise Guide, are you a single, consistent person? Or do you have more identities than Chevy Chase in Fletch? When you connect to a SAS environment, you can be many people at once: You are logged into your Windows account on
The SAS Talks series is a big hit, and now we've got a landing page where you can find previously recorded talks, plus information about upcoming talks. You can learn about SAS programming with SAS Enterprise Guide, ODS statistical graphics, fancy multi-sheet output for Microsoft Excel from SAS, and more!
Check out AnnMaria's blog covering what she's learned by being on the bleeding edge: using SAS 9.2 for Windows x64 on a Win7 virtual machine. Also, her short primer on XPT files makes me want to add some native capability into SAS Enterprise Guide. If your goal is to send
Which versions of MySQL are supported by SAS 9.1.3 for Windows? Is the 64-bit version of Oracle 11g supported on the 64-bit version of SAS 9.2 on Linux? You can find the answers to these questions and others like it by consulting the SAS/ACCESS Validation Matrix: pick your SAS version,
Within SAS, we have a strong blogging community made up of SAS employees. Those of us who read or contribute to the blog content on the internal SAS web got a special "shout out" from Fortune magazine, within its coverage of SAS as the top workplace in the USA. The
I've been to a bunch of SAS Global Forum (née SUGI) events over the years. I always look forward to going, because I always think that by being there in person, I'll be able to provide some customers with exactly the information they need to use SAS better. And I
As you use the Query Builder task in SAS Enterprise Guide, you might notice that it refers to tables and computed columns using names that are different than you expect. For example, instead of a table named CANDY_SALES_HISTORY, the Query Builder might show t1. This is called an alias, and
Andy wrote in the NOTE: blog that he's stumbled upon a few custom tasks to extend features in SAS Enterprise Guide. He wondered aloud whether there might be more "free" tasks out there, available for use by anyone who can find them and download them. The answer is: You betcha!*
In case you missed the business news last week, SAS (the company that pays me to write this blog, and the leader in business analytics) was named #1 on the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For 2010 list. Having been a user (and huge fan) of SAS software since
Subtitle: An accounting of accounts which, by all accounts, you should hold accountable. With the introduction of the SAS metadata server for use with SAS Business Intelligence, the role of the SAS administrator became more important. In SAS 9.1.3 a number of new standard "accounts" -- user IDs that serve
The easiest option is to simply move your 9.2 format catalog to Lev1/SASApp/SASEnvironment/SASFormats/formats.sas7bcat. But you can also modify your SASv9.cfg configuration file to point to a different location: -set fmtlib1 "E:sharedformats" -fmtsearch (fmtlib1.formats) So e:sharedformats is a shared location for the format catalog, and formats (filename formats.sas7bcat) is the name
This sign greeted me as I was driving into work this morning for a routine appointment at our onsite health care center. Appropriate, don't you think? Last year at this time, I downplayed the importance of being the actual #1 company to work for, stating that the "staying power" that
SAS' Tonya Balan answers this question, plus many other basic business analytics questions, right here in the current issue of sascom magazine. It sure helps me, a statistical layman, to talk the talk.
This year the SAS Global Forum group is sponsoring a t-shirt design contest to create the official garb of SAS Global Forum 2010. It sounds like a fun activity, but as a SAS employee I'm not eligible to participate (or more importantly, to win). Still, I can't resist an attempt.
Angela recently posted about how important it is for technical experts to share, not hoard, their information. Late last year I completed a technical review of The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. Before that I served as reviewer for The Little SAS Book, Fourth Edition (covers SAS 9.2).
Today my colleague Alison Bolen, Editor of sascom magazine, sent me this link to an interesting piece on NPR: "Can Economic Forecasting Predict The Future?" In a somewhat lighthearted take on the inability of our economists to predict the future -- or even precisely report the past for that matter
North Carolina law enforcement officials can now track individual criminal histories using a much more comprehensive collection of data, all managed and accessed via software provided by SAS. According to this recent news article, transitioning from the archaic text-screen-based system to the new web-based interface is "like switching between Pong
