Think of this as consumer protection for the business forecaster. The Business Forecasting Deal is a new blog exploring the dark side of the forecasting profession. Its purpose is to expose the snake oil and shoddy practices of those who either don’t understand the realities of forecasting, or who can’t
Just last week I posted about Jim Davis joining the blogging fray, and now here comes SAS Exceutive VP Mikael Hagström with his own blog, ominously titled "In the Final Analysis". If this keeps up, my entire SAS Dummy blog will be spent announcing other SAS blogs. Well, you don't
You might be the sort of person who loves to wait indefinitely. You visit the DMV regularly to tweak your auto registration. You queue up in the supermarket checkout line behind the customer most likely to require "price checks". You map your daily commute along the routes that offer the
Jim Davis, Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS: welcome to the SAS blogosphere. Jim is a great communicator and has a tremendous rapport with SAS customers; I'm sure that his blog will prove that out. I remember first meeting Jim way back shortly after he joined SAS. This
NCSU statistics students: welcome to SAS Hall, your new home for higher learning. I'm glad they named it SAS Hall; "Sall Hall" is a bit too rhymey and "Goodnight Hall" might encourage classroom sleepiness.
Question: What do you get when you cross your Facebook friends with SAS analytics? Answer: Insight, probably more about yourself than anything else. You can tell a lot about yourself by looking at your friends. And I'll bet that so can Facebook and those who advertise on it. Data from
AnnMaria artfully qualifies her use of the word "lovely" as she describes her experience with one of our SAS customer representatives. The whole reason for the encounter: AnnMaria needed to get the correct sort of software order so that she and her colleagues can run SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise
Recoding values is one of the most common data prep tasks that folks need to do before they can analyze and report on data. In SAS, the most elegant way to handle this is by applying a SAS format. A SAS format allows you to "bucket" a bunch of raw
The SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 tutorial is going global, with translated versions now hitting the SAS support site. First up, after the English version, are Italian and German. Other languages will soon follow. Update 22Apr2009: just added French and Spanish as well. This represents a couple of firsts for us:
The mainstream press never misses an opportunity to point out how our children are falling behind in math skills and won't be able to compete in the global marketplace. But I don't believe it, and I'll tell you why. For centuries, children have used counting rhymes to select a person
If you don't have SAS Management Console, you can still view the BIP Tree from SAS Enterprise Guide. This is particularly useful for (cough -- all) organizations that need to reduce their exposure of incorrect Metadata changes. In SAS Enterprise Guide, Select 'View' -> 'SAS Folders'. Then users can create
Thanks for reading this far. I'm sure that you've realized it by now, but the "SAS on the Wii" announcement is my idea of a joke, as warped as that might seem. Happy April Fools' Day! As far as I know, SAS is not currently planning a new release for
Last week at SAS Global Forum, SAS demonstrated its commitment to bring powerful business analytics to customers wherever they choose to work, including on the desktop, on the Web, and on mobile devices such as the iPhone. In that spirit, SAS today announced plans to port its powerful analytics software
A fun article for April Fools Day. Reference:http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Special:ListSubBlogs/User:Richard.thesasguy 1. SAS is not like Oracle, your email system, or anything else for that matter. When viewed as a system, SAS software does not behave like a database, or any other operational system. Usually, very little goes on without the direct involvement
I really enjoyed this blog post by AnnMaria: "The Sea Monkey Effect prevents robot uprising". I think my reading experience was enhanced because I met* the author at SAS Global Forum yesterday. AnnMaria should apply for a grant and enter into the annals of improbable research. *(She told me that
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration of a woman who is widely appreciated as "the first programmer". At SAS I work with a lot of programmers and other technical folks, many of whom are women (including my boss and my boss' boss). I tend to take this for granted,
During SAS Global Forum, I had the privilege of sneaking backstage at the Technical Session to meet with keynote speaker Dave Barry. I made it abundantly clear to everyone involved, this meeting was all about me and my opportunity to meet a literary legend. The fact that I was on
Right now I'm packing up my materials for SAS Global Forum. It's actually a lot easier than it used to be. My first SAS conference was SUGI 21 (1996), and we didn't have personal laptop computers or USB drives or fast network connections. Machines were staged weeks ahead of time
64-bit computing has arrived to the mainstream desktop (and even laptops). Can you even buy a 32-bit Windows PC anymore? I mean from a store (not a garage sale)? At work, I've just been issued a shiny new Windows box with the 64-bit edition of Microsoft Vista installed on it.
Well, the countdown to the SGF09 event began (at least according to an email I saw this morning). For those attending; the educational, networking and entertainment opportunities abound. But for those of you who are unable to attend, I found an interesting article from a fellow twitterer that you might
Useful charts can serve to persuade an audience of certain "truths", because they take real data and communicate it in a clear, visual medium. But what happens when you know something to be true, but you have no real data? Should you let the lack of hard data prevent you
Before it was considered cool to tweet information to the world, SAS users who were hungry for inside information came to rely on a Little Birdie -- as in "a Little Birdie told me..." sasCommunity.org has a nice history of the Little Birdie. The article mentions the "Jurassic period"; does
It's obvious that you have missed the submission deadline to get your own paper into the SGF2009 Washington DC Conference, so that can not be the reason to attend. So what steps can you take to convince your boss that paying for the conference is a good benefit for them
Posted on https://blogs.sas.com/content/sascom: Our friends at Zencos also offered a few predictions and recommendations, including: Increasing efficiencies: Companies will be reallocating resources effectively to succeed (or at least stay in business). Focused industries: Follow the new administration’s priorities to see which industries will bounce back first – government infrastructure, healthcare
The SAS output delivery system (ODS) makes it so easy to create great-looking output that many folks forget that you can make it even better. One step that folks often leave out: applying a custom title for HTML output. I'm not talking about the title text that you see as
We recently confirmed (via http://support.sas.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=10&start;=0) that SAS Enterprise Guide does not support proxy servers between itself and SAS servers (metadata, workspace, stored process, etc). However, if the proxy server can be transparent then EG can work through it. While implementing SAS BI at a customer site we needed to access
Don't forget to register for the SAS Global Forum 2009! http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/index.html March 22-25, 2009 Washington, DC And check out my submitted paper on Monday afternoon - Supporting a SAS Server Architecture Included topics: Documenting the routine tasks (such as restarting services in the correct order and adding users)
SAS Enterprise Guide allows users to access files on the SAS server environment. Only one of the three options can be set - either to point to the designated user folder 'SAS User Root', set to the root 'System Root', or define a shared location/directory 'path'. The SAS Administrator sets
The output delivery system (ODS) provides some wonderful out-of-the-sas-box custom style sheets (CSS) for use in SAS web output. My personal favorite is 'sasweb'. However, many organizations wish to modify these and deploy new style sheets to the enterprise. The best approach I have found is to utilize the Enterprise
So, you want to do two things at once? When you use SAS Enterprise Guide to create a project, the work items in that project typically run one at a time, in series. For example, consider the following process flow: In this flow, SAS Enterprise Guide will run the tasks
