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?
We have seen in a previous post of this series how to configure SAS Studio to better manage user preferences in SAS Grid environments. There are additional settings that an administrator can leverage to properly configure a multi-user environment; as you may imagine, these options deserve special considerations when SAS Studio
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
As the holidays approach, one of the highlights (for most of us) is time spent visiting with family. For me, this is one of two times a year when my entire family comes together - and, it has become customary for my two brothers and me to spend a bulk
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
Editor's note: The following post is from Melissa Marshall, Principal at Melissa Marshall Consulting LLC. Melissa is a featured speaker at SAS Global Forum 2017, and on a mission to transform how scientists and technical professionals present their work. Learn more about Melissa. Think back to the last technical talk you were an
The report-ready SAS Environment Manager Data Mart has been an invaluable addition to SAS 9.4 for SAS administrators. The data mart tables are created and maintained by the SAS Environment Manager Service Architecture Framework and provide a source of data for out-of-the box reports as well as custom reports that any
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
Thank you SAS community for all the fun this year! We truly enjoy each moment with you as you take care of your health both here at SAS and in your adventures around the world! May you be happy, healthy, and loved now and always! While we're talking health.... Don’t
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
Yesterday, I published an article on Axis values display, where I mentioned the desire expressed by many users to get x-axis tick values in Hotel text orienttion. The name comes from the way many hotel signs are displayed as shown on the right. Such arrangement of text can also be very
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
The title of this post borrows from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 comedy “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It stars the great Peter Sellers as the titular character as well as George C. Scott and Slim Pickens. The black and white film is strange
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
There has been a lot of speculation over the years about the quality of the optimization solvers in SAS/OR, in particular the mixed integer linear optimization (MILP) solver. Measuring the performance of optimization solvers and comparing different solvers on a test set is a crucial part of modern optimization solver development.
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
Displaying nicely rendered axis values reduces clutter and makes the graph more readable. With SAS 9.4, we added the ability for splitting x-axis tick values on white space to create a nice and readable x-axis as shown in the graph on the right. It is always a challenge to fit
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
A multilabel format enables you to assign multiple labels to a value or a range of values. The capability to add multilabel formats was added to the FORMAT procedure in SAS® 8.2. You assign multiple labels by specifying the MULTILABEL option in the VALUE statement of PROC FORMAT. For example,
"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
