Belated code
SAS Code for your Valentine - just in case you forgot to get flowers, chocolate or other tokens of affection for the big day yesterday.
English
What are the odds of ... winning the lottery?
What are the odds of winning the lottery? This seems like a simple question (and yes, there is a simple answer), but there are a few technical details to work out first... Which lottery? Let's say the Powerball Lottery. When? The number of balls used in the Powerball lottery has
Registering DBMS data in SAS Management Console
I am a big fan of SAS Management Console. This is the central location where you can perform many of your SAS administration tasks. One of the most important tasks of a SAS Administrator is making sure data is available to the right people when they need it. Most of
5 Powerful Foods For Your Heart
February is Heart Month First the bad news, heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women. Now the good news, heart disease is preventable and controllable. Chews Strategically will focus on the health of your heart for the month of February so tune in and learn
How to access any program or data set that appears in the SAS/STAT documentation
If you are like me, you've experienced the following frustration. You are reading the SAS/STAT documentation, trying to understand some procedure or option, when you find an example that is very similar to what you need. "Great," you think, "this example will help me understand how the SAS procedure works!"
Mathematical squiggles in SAS
John D. Cook shared a picture of "pretty squiggles" on his blog, as well as a prose description of the mathematics behind it. I'm more of a programmer than a mathematician, but I've attempted to transcribe his description into a SAS program. I used DATA step to generate the point
GTL Layouts
The Graph Template Language (GTL) provides you the ability to create complex graphical layouts. We have seen how to create a regular grid of cells based on one or more classification variables using the SGPANEL procedure. Each cell contains the same type of plot. This topic was covered in Dan's article on
Time to trade in your jalopy macro?
Suppose you have an old jalopy that's perfectly reliable. Your jalopy gets you where you wanna go: no frills; no drama. Do you trade your old wheels in for a racecar that accelerates like crazy and corners like it's on rails? Or stick with what's old and comfortable? Your choice
Tiny macros break up big problems
There are many different ways to do something; my approach is all about breaking a problem into smaller problems. I try as much as possible to stay away from developing something that can only serve a purpose in one problem. I achieve this by keeping things modular. Each tool should
How the J function got its name
In linear algebra, the I symbol is used to denote an n x n identity matrix. The symbol J (or sometimes 1) is used to denote an n x p matrix of ones. When the SAS/IML language was implemented, the I function was defined to generate the identity matrix. The J function was defined
If Netflix had used my viewing history to create its new show
Netflix has made a big splash in the news with its use of big data. By analyzing millions of data points about the viewing habits of its customers, the movie delivery giant used the insight it gained to devise the "perfect show". One of the defining characteristics of the show,
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Visualization lets them 'see' the data
Were you at SAS Global Forum last spring? Dr. Goodnight sat down at a computer console and personally demonstrated the cool things that SAS® Visual Analytics Explorer can do? Take a look at his demo, and then imagine working in a drag-and-drop, point and click environment with billions of rows
A SAS graph for the Chinese New Year
I like to think that I have a graph for all occasions - Chinese New Year is no exception! ... The exact date of the Chinese New Year varies from year to year, because it's based on the lunar (moon) cycles. I thought it would be useful to create a
Two methods for editing SAS metadata
The SAS Metadata Server holds all of the metadata for a given SAS EBI installation. For most SAS administrators, the sole view into the Metadata Server is through SAS Management Console. This is a very limited perspective out of the box, as much of the metadata is not surfaced by
Find variables common to multiple data sets
Last week the SAS Training Post blog posted a short article on an easy way to find variables in common to two data sets. The article used PROC CONTENTS (with the SHORT option) to print out the names of variables in SAS data sets so that you can visually determine
A database professional’s best friend
To optimize a Structured Query Language (SQL), the database professional must befriend this order and perhaps even embrace it. Who is your best friend? I’m talking about the order in which SQL processes your statements. Simply put, in what order does SQL do your work? (From my previous post you
Percent VBar
Recently a reader chimed in with a question on the Do Loop article by Rick Wicklin on how to create a bar chart with percent statistics. Rick used SAS 9.3 and the reader wanted to do the same with SAS 9.2. For the basic (non-grouped) bar chart, the process is the
New SAS text analytics community
I'm happy to announce a new SAS text analytics community (online forum)! The community is a centralized location for everyone using SAS text analytics, including those working with Text Miner, Enterprise/Content Categorization, Sentiment Analysis and Ontology Management. Join the community to: Discuss ideas. Ask questions. Seek peer assistance. Share areas
Hats and apps on tap for my #SASGF13
When I travel to San Francisco in April for SAS Global Forum 2013, it will make my 12th time to attend the international SAS users group conference, and my 7th consecutive year. A lot of people assume that I automatically go every year, but the truth is that SAS employees
Simulate discrete variables by using the "Table" distribution
I wanted to write a blog post about the "Table distribution" in SAS. The Table distribution, which is supported by the RAND and the RANDGEN function, enables you to specify the probability of selecting each of k items. Therefore you can use the Table distribution to sample, with replacement, from
Why "soft skills" are so important in analytics....and how to learn them
How many analytical projects have foundered due to lack of problem definition and other soft skills? As my SAS colleague Sascha Schubert writes, people and process matter, in addition to great technology. Great technology is a great first step, but having the right people following the right process is critically important.
Friday's Innovation Inspiration - Recycle, reuse
This technical case study by Faisal Dosani, Royal Bank of Canada; Lisa Eckler, Lisa Eckler Consulting Inc.; and Marje Fecht, Prowerk Consulting Ltd., discusses the steps to develop a hands-off process for creating flexible and extensible solutions that avoid maintainability issues and enable speed to market of results. Building reusable
Tracking tornadoes with SAS
We had some fierce wind storms all across the United States yesterday, which even spawned some tornadoes! It looks like we weathered the storm OK here in Cary (but I still need to run out to the lake and make sure my pontoon/houseboat is still there, agh!). Anyway ... as with other
AE Timeline by Name
In my previous article on Adverse Event Timeline Graph, I wrote about how to create the AE timeline using SAS 9.2 code, using VECTOR plot and the MARKERCHAR option in SCATTER plot. I described a better way to place the labels at the lower end of the vectors. SAS 9.3 provides an easier way
Tracking progress in your program with SAS Enterprise Guide: another trick
I've got a new trick that you can use to track progress in a long-running SAS program, while using SAS Enterprise Guide. I've previously written about the SYSECHO statement and how you can use it to update the Task Status window with custom messages. SYSECHO is a "global" statement in
An easy way to find variables in common to data sets
Over the holidays I was having a discussion with my cat, Ms. Trixie Lou. A question that often arises during the first programming class is the following: how do I find the variables that are in common to these two or three data sets? As it turns out, Ms. Trixie
Protecting your metadata protections
I think most people would agree that there's not much point in locking your front door if you're going to leave the keys in the lock. With a SAS platform metadata security implementation, it is just as important to ensure that the metadata access controls that you have carefully put
Oh, those pesky temporary variables!
The SAS/IML language secretly creates temporary variables. Most of the time programmers aren't even aware that the language does this. However, there is one situation where if you don't think carefully about temporary variables, your program will silently produce an error. And as every programmer knows, silent wrong numbers are
Unicode Tick Values using GTL
Often it is desirable to use special Unicode characters for the tick value names on the axes. However, SG procedures and GTL do not support Unicode strings in SAS data sets. With SAS 9.3, the SGPLOT procedure supports annotation which does support Unicode strings. You can create an annotation data set
SAS and Windows 8
Windows 8 was officially released Friday October 26. This was Microsoft’s first operating system release since the introduction of Apple’s iPad and the subsequent surge in popularity of tablets. To align their OS with the new computing devices, Windows 8 has two interfaces to allow access from traditional desktops and laptops and