For several releases, SAS has supported a cryptographic hash function called MD5, or "message digest". In SAS 9.4 Maintenance 1, the new SHA256 function can serve the same purpose with a better implementation. The job of a hash function is to take some input (of any type and of any
Interested in text mining? This week's SAS tip is from the new book - Text Mining and Analysis: Practical Methods, Examples, and Case Studies Using SAS by Goutam Chakraborty, Murali Pagolu, and Satish Garla. This hands-on guide is getting strong early reviews - and perhaps you'd like to write your own after reading the
Watching the news recently it occurred to me that many of the stories involved data in some way. Many of the reports from the recent Consumer Electronics Show showcased products to enable users to create and use ever-growing personal collections of data. Want data on how well you sleep? No
It's an exciting morning here at SAS. We just found out we are ranked #2 on this year's FORTUNE Best Companies to Work For list. SAS has been on the U.S. list every year since FORTUNE first published it. We've been in the top 10 many times with back-to-back No.
Today's announcement of SAS once again being named a Best Place to Work is a point of pride for our company. It's our 17th year in a row on this esteemed list and 11th time in the top 10. I can attest that the recognition is well-deserved, and our workplace culture is more than
Starting with SAS 9.4, not only will SAS administrators see lots of processes running on your operating system supporting the various SAS servers (such as SAS Metadata server), you will also see two new processes that have a description of “agent” running. Agents are software processes responsible for tasks such
Late last month, while many of us were sipping eggnog and decking halls with boughs of holly, SAS released the 13.1 version of its analytical products. Readers of Maura Stokes' newsletter, SAS Statistics and Operations Research News (Nov 2013), have already been alerted to new features in products such as
Every day of the year is an official 'national day' for something - here's a SAS chart to help you find which bizarre 'national day' falls on your birthday! I recently read an article that lists weird and unconventional national days. It was very interesting, but I found the data
Editor's Note: Jenny Kelley teaches third grade in Pitt County, NC. She recently earned certification as a SAS® Curriculum Pathways® Master Teacher. On January 23, information for the 2014-2015 Master Teacher Program will be available on our web site. In this guest post, Jenny describes some of the SAS Curriculum Pathways resources she uses
Vector languages such as SAS/IML, MATLAB, and R are powerful because they enable you to use high-level matrix operations (matrix multiplication, dot products, etc) rather than loops that perform scalar operations. In general, vectorized programs are more efficient (and therefore run faster) than programs that contain loops. For an example
The amazing digital world we live in provides consumers with information whenever, wherever and however they want it. It can be both dazzling and dizzying at the same time, so more and more consumers gravitate toward brands they can trust, companies that know them and organizations that engage with them in ways
When you create maps, you are typically plotting data for analytics -- but you can also use SAS to create 'pretty' maps for background decorations (for posters, slides, presentations, etc). This blog shows you a few examples... A few years ago I noticed that the CNN Situation Room had a decorative
Software performance is a complex topic. The answer to every question depends—depends on hardware, depends on operating system, architecture, time of day, number of users and so on. (Margaret Crevar gave us some insight into that complexity in her January 2013 post Improving performance: Understand the problem.) That’s why we
Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? Do you typically achieve them? Studies say that only about 40-50% of us make New Year’s Resolutions each year, and unfortunately very few of us actually succeed. Why is that? Were they unrealistic? Did we prepare to succeed? Were we ready to make a
Following Sanjay's cue (see “R U Graphing with SAS”), I tried creating data driven multi-cell graphs using R. I played with the lattice and ggplot2 packages. I found ggplot2 simpler to understand and use than lattice, but there are probably some trades offs. Data-driven layouts are referred to as 'faceting'
In 2013 I published 110 blog posts. Some of these articles were more popular than others, often because they were linked to from a SAS newsletter such as the SAS Statistics and Operations Research News. In no particular order, here are some of my most popular posts from 2013, organized
Sure, you have a great looking table and you produce it with PROC TABULATE. And then, bam! Your boss comes along and decides that since your output looks so good in Word, that he’d like that boilerplate paragraph inserted automatically. Currently, you produce the tables and then pass the RTF
Because I began my SAS career in the Publications division, I like to think that I have a keen eye when it comes to SAS documentation. When I first visited the SAS 9.4 online documentation, I immediately noticed that it had a different look. Examine the image below; can you
Ron Cody starts things off right with our first SAS tip of 2014. If you resolve to become a better statistical programmer this year, Ron's book SAS Statistics by Example is a great place to start. After you take a look at this week's free excerpt from the book, head over to Ron's author page. You'll
When working with teachers in professional-development sessions, I try not to sugar-coat the reality of technology integration. It takes time and hard work to design and implement high-quality, technology-infused lesson plans. Just think about the steps involved in this process: identify a curriculum requirement, find and evaluate digital resources, plan
Recently a user new to GTL and SG procedures asked how to create a Bland-Altman graph on the SAS Communities site. He included an image of the resulting graph to indicate what he wanted, I described to him how that graph can be created, but since he is new to the art
Welcome to the SAS administrator blog series for 2014! Back in early 2013, the most popular posts on the SAS Users Groups blog were all about the roles and responsibilites of SAS administrators. I was reminded of them during a presentation at WUSS 2013 in Las Vegas. Carey Smoak of
As 2013 comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of some of the topics that captured our attention this year in the context of five “hot topics” we focused on. Marketing Analytics Marketing Analytics is near and dear to our hearts, among other reasons because we’ve had a
In my previous post I described the new Polygon plot statement that is included with the SAS 9.4M1 release. So, a valid question is - what is my motivation for discussing the new features in SAS 9.4M1 when most users are at SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.2 versions? Here are a
In November, I resumed the “it’s all about the data” series, laying a foundation for helping SAS administrators understand how SAS stores and manages data for use in business intelligence and analytic applications. For this article, I culled our internal Thotwave knowledge base and queried our consultants who get questions
My children learned this skill early in life: when you want to secure permission for a questionable activity (say, "watch 5 hours of Phineas and Ferb" or "eat a bowl of candy for breakfast"), you should approach the most lenient adult in the household. In my early days of fatherhood,
The SAS 9.4 Maintenance 1 release is now shipping to users. This is great news for GTL and SG procedures users as this release includes some useful new features. Some of these are in direct response to your requests, and others are enhancements that we think you will come to like.
Analytics is not just about algorithms and numbers. Every analytics practitioner will tell you that there is an “art” to it – when to combine variables to extend data in the data warehouse, what options to set in the algorithm to get the best balance of accuracy and interpretability, how
As we near the heights of this festive holiday season, children have thoughts of sugar plums dancing in their heads and adults look forward to a long winter’s nap, but we elves of the SAS media relations team reflect on the fruits of a year’s worth of labor. This is
Often we have situations where the category values on the graph have long character strings. This is often the case when graphing survey responses to questions. The questions may be sentences, sometimes moderately long. With SAS 9.4, GTL and SG now support the ability to display tick values split over
