In hopes of adding to your SAS Global Forum experience, we've kicked off a SAS presenters series. Here, we’ve asked some of the SAS presenters five questions to learn more about what makes them tick, why they chose to present and what they hoped you would take away from the presentation. Take a look at Howard Plemmons’ answers.

Howard Plemmons, Manager, Product Development

Is there something interesting about yourself that you could share with us? Perhaps, you could share something that would help bring your personality to life for those who don’t know you well.
I spent several summers on my grandparents’ farm, where I learned quite a bit about farming life. I learned how to milk a cow, chop wood for the stove, tend bees, drive a tractor, can vegetables and chew tobacco. Let's just say the tobacco chewing experience was a single event.

How many times have you been to SAS Global Forum?
If I’ve counted correctly, this will be my 15th SAS Global Forum. One experience that sticks out, is when the volcano display at SUGI Hawaii caught fire during the opening session. Before the guests realized that flames were not part of the session, the volcano had been extinguished.

I understand you have two papers at SAS Global Forum this year. What did you hope to offer the user with these papers?
One focuses on SAS/ACCESS to PC Files and the other focuses on performance initiatives when using SAS/ACCESS to different databases [Top Ten SAS/DBMS Performance Boosters for 2009]. These papers contain usage and performance information that SAS/ACCESS customers can use to improve their experience with SAS/ACCESS. I hope that they will find a couple of items that they can put to use.

During your presentation, what were the most important highlights or questions that you hoped to cover?
The concepts provided in my SAS Global Forum papers can be applied to customer issues. I hope I provided enough detail to enable the SAS customer to solve specific usage and performance issues.