I was sitting in a model railroad club meeting when one of our more enthusiastic young members said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could make a computer simulation, with trains going between stations and all. We could have cars and engines assigned to each train and timetables and…" So,
One of my favorite parts of summer is a relaxing weekend by the pool. Summer is the time I get to finally catch up on my reading list, which has been building over the year. So, if expanding your knowledge is a goal of yours this summer, SAS Press has
In his article How to use CASL to develop and work with user-defined CAS actions, Brian Kinnebrew defines CASL as "a language specification used by the SAS client to interact with and provide easy access to Cloud Analytic Services (CAS). CASL is a statement-based scripting language with many uses and
What is Item Response Theory? Item Response Theory (IRT) is a way to analyze responses to tests or questionnaires with the goal of improving measurement accuracy and reliability. A common application is in testing a student’s ability or knowledge. Today, all major psychological and educational tests are built using IRT.
Want to learn SAS programming but worried about taking the plunge? Over at SAS Press, we are excited about an upcoming publication that introduces newbies to SAS in a peer-review instruction format we have found popular for the classroom. Professors Jim Blum and Jonathan Duggins have written Fundamentals of Programming
Two sayings I’ve heard countless times throughout my life are “Work smarter, not harder,” and “Use the best tool for the job.” If you need to drive a nail, you pick up a hammer, not a wrench or a screwdriver. In the programming world, this could mean using an existing
Structuring a highly unstructured data source Human language is astoundingly complex and diverse. We express ourselves in infinite ways. It can be very difficult to model and extract meaning from both written and spoken language. Usually the most meaningful analysis uses a number of techniques. While supervised and unsupervised learning,
Whether you are a strong believer in the power of dividing by zero, agnostic, undecided, a supporter, denier or anything in between and beyond, this blog post will bring all to a common denominator. History of injustice For how many years have you been told that you cannot divide by
In automated production (or business operations) environments, we often run SAS job flows in batch mode and on schedule. SAS job flow is a collection of several inter-dependent SAS programs executed as a single process. In my earlier posts, Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux and Let SAS write
Find out about the new SAS Certified Specialist credential, and all the ways you can prepare for it.
Recently, I worked on a cybersecurity project that entailed processing a staggering number of raw text files about web traffic. Millions of rows had to be read and parsed to extract variable values. The problem was complicated by the varying records composition. Each external raw file was a collection of
Every so often, SAS Technical Support highlights questions that come in on a regular basis. This is one of those times. Here Kim Wilson describes answers to questions covering SAS dates, arrays, and how to reference local PC files from SAS® Enterprise Guide® and SAS® Studio when those applications connect to a SAS® server in UNIX operating environments.
While support.sas.com remains the holy grail of SAS support resources, there are so many good choices, it can sometimes be hard to know where to start. That’s why we’ve put together a new guide to make things easier for new SAS users: the SAS Starter Kit.
SAS Technical Support has had several requests from customers who want to use SAS® software to help download their files from a website when there is no application programming interface (API) to do it. This post shows how to automate downloads using PROC HTTP and DATA step, and how to use the HTTP DEBUG statement.
Data in the cloud makes it easily accessible, and can help businesses run more smoothly. SAS Viya runs its calculations on Cloud Analytics Service (CAS). David Shannon of Amadeus Software spoke at SAS Global Forum 2018 on his paper, Come On, Baby, Light my SAS Viya: Programming for CAS.
SAS batch jobs can generate many log files that accumulate over time. In this post, we present a SAS program that cleans up old log files on your system.
The Geo Map Visualization has several built-in geographical units, including country and region names and codes, US state names and codes, and US zip codes. You can also define your own geographic units. This paper describes how to identify any geographic point of interest, or collection of points, on a map to create custom maps in SAS.
There are many ways to avoid transcoding problems when you have national language characters in SAS programs that you save from a SAS®9 (English) session and move to a UTF-8 environment. In this article, we'll share tips to help you avoid such issues.
To reference CAS tables using a one-level name we will issue two statements that alter which libref houses the tables referenced as one-level names.
Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) is really exciting. It’s open, multi-threaded and distributed. And, best of all for SAS programmers, it’s SAS. You can even run DATA Step in CAS. Here's more on how DATA Step work in a multi-threaded, distributed context.
SAS Studio is the latest way you can access SAS. This newer interface allows users to reach SAS through a web browser, offering a number of unique ways that SAS can be optimized. At SAS Global Forum 2018, Lora Delwiche and Susan J Slaughter gave the presentation, “SAS Studio: A New Way to Program in SAS.” This post reviews the paper, offering you insights of how to enhance your SAS Studio programming performance.
It is imperative for developers, whether hardware or software engineers, to foresee unintended (probable or improbable) system usages and implement features that will make their creations foolproof, that is protected from misuse. Learn more about developing foolproof solutions with this old Russian anecdote.
Learn how to change your working directory for SAS. Beginning with SAS® 9.4 TS1M4, you can use a new DATA step function, DLGCDIR, to change the location of your working directory.
Datasets can present themselves in different ways. Identical data can bet arranged differently, often as wide or tall datasets. Generally, the tall dataset is better. Learn how to convert wide data into tall data with PROC TRANSPOSE.
The %SYSFUNC macro function allows you to access most SAS® functions. In this blog post, I demonstrate how %SYSFUNC can help in your programming needs when a macro function might not exist. I'll also share the formatting feature that is built in to %SYSFUNC and introduce the %QSYSFUNC that masks the returned value.
The release of SAS Viya 3.3 has brought some nice data quality features. In addition to the visual applications like Data Studio or Data Explorer that are part of the Data Preparation offering, one can leverage data quality capabilities from a programming perspective. Here is an overview of SAS Data Quality 3.3 programming capabilities.
SAS Data Studio is a new application in SAS Viya 3.3 that provides a mechanism for performing simple, self-service data preparation tasks to prepare data for use in SAS Visual Analytics or other applications. It is accessed via the Prepare Data menu item or tile on SAS Home. Note: A
It is not laziness—it is efficiency!!! Programmers are often called lazy; we even call ourselves lazy. But we are not lazy, we are just being efficient. It makes no sense to type the same code over and over again or use more keystrokes than are absolutely necessary. Keyboard Macros You
Are you interested in using SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 to visualize a state by regions, but all you have is a county shapefile? As long as you can cross-walk counties to regions, this is easier to do than you might think. Here are the steps involved: Step 1 Obtain a
If Necessity is the mother of Invention, then, perhaps, the father of Automation is Laziness. Automation is all about convenience, comfort, and productivity. Why do it yourself if you can devise something to do it for you! In my previous post Running SAS programs in batch under Unix/Linux, we learned
