I remember the first time I was faced with the challenge of parallelizing a DATA step process. It was 2001 and SAS V8.1 was shiny and new. We were processing very large data sets, and the computations performed on each record were quite complex. The processing was crawling along on
Tag: tips and tricks
With any software program, there are always new tips and tricks to learn, and nobody can know them all. Sometimes I even pick up tips or techniques from my students while they’re learning broader programming tips from me. Like fine wine, instructors only get better with age. Every customer interaction
With Pi Day coming up on 3/14, I wanted to make sure all you SAS programmers know how to use the pi constant in your SAS code... All you have to do is use constant("pi") in a data step, and you've got the value of pi out to a good many decimal places
While perusing the SAS 9.4 DS2 documentation, I ran across the section on the HTTP package. This intrigued me because, as DS2 has no text file handling statements I assumed all hope of leveraging Internet-based APIs was lost. But even a Jedi is wrong now and then! And what better
December is all about traditions. Some of mine include holiday shopping, baking (I really mean eating) Christmas cookies and putting together my annual list of most read blogs on the SAS Training Post. So as traditions go… here’s my list of the top 10 most read blogs in 2014. How
A student in a SAS class recently asked if there were a way to eliminate data error notes from the SAS log and, instead, write them to a separate file. Of course there's a way! Here's a simple datastep. Notice the missing dollar sign to indicate the variable GENDER (M,
A student brought in this coding problem after her manager was struggling with this issue for a while. They played guessing games, but to no avail. Here’s what happened when they submitted data step and proc sql code using a WHERE clause with an INPUT function? data aileen; length hcn
In the first Star Wars movie, Obi-wan uses Jedi mind tricks to convince the stormtroopers that the droids they see are not the droids they're looking for. A colleague at SAS passed along a question from a SAS user where the column labels they were seeing were NOT the labels
When teaching statistics, it is often useful to produce a normal density plot with shading under the curve. For example, consider a one-sided hypothesis test. An alpha value of .05 would correspond to a Z-score cutoff of 1.645. This means that 95% of a standard normal curve falls below a
This SAS tutorial video will show you how to generate plots for two continuous numeric variables with Base SAS. Basic scatter plots, linear or curvilinear regression lines, confidence intervals or ellipses, and multiple plot overlays are demonstrated. To learn more about this topic, check out our SAS Programming 1: Essentials