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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJune 6, 2012 0

Eight tips to make your simulation run faster

"Help! My simulation is taking too long to run! How can I make it go faster?" I frequently talk with statistical programmers who claim that their "simulations are too slow" (by which they mean, "they take too long"). They suspect that their program is inefficient, but they aren't sure why.

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Programming Tips

Kathryn McLawhornMay 30, 2012 0

Concatenation with speed and style

I am part of a 'virtual team from SAS Technical Support' who provide the suggestions for the Tips & Techiques section for the SAS Tech Report each month. A couple of days ago, Bill Gibson, Chief Technology Officer from SAS Australia, sent us an email saying that like him, many

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerMay 22, 2012 0

Query the Windows registry within your SAS program

On the SAS-L mailing list, a participant posed this question (paraphrased): How can I tell which date format my Windows session is using: European format (with day first) versus USA format (with month first)? I'm reading in output from a Windows file listing, and need to know how to interpret

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Programming Tips

How long did the task take?

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerMay 15, 2012 0

How much time will your process flow take to run?

SAS users, by definition, do not embrace the mysterious. That's one of the main reasons that they use SAS: to demystify some data or process. And so, when you (as a SAS user) have gone to the trouble of designing a process flow in SAS Enterprise Guide, you like to

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarMay 10, 2012 0

#1 SAS programming tip for 2012

What tiny looking operator packs a mighty punch with large datasets? Your queries are big. Your reports span multiple columns. To top it all you have to summarize data in multiple ways. Are you tempted to throw in the towel? Do you feel like saying a firm “Can’t be done”

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Programming Tips

SAS JediMay 3, 2012 0

Jedi SAS Tricks – Roll Your Own Function

A SAS user (who lives in the the US) emailed me a question about SAS functions. He was reading UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) datetime values from server logs, and to make future calculations and comparisons easier, he wanted to transform the value to local datetime. The INTNX() function worked great, but

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerMay 1, 2012 0

The top gotchas when moving to 64-bit SAS for Windows

Many SAS customers are quickly adopting 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows, and they are pleased-as-punch when they find a 64-bit version of SAS to run on it. They waste no time in deploying the new version, only to find that a few things don't work quite the same as they

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsApril 30, 2012 0

Selecting all observations when any observation is of interest

Now, we all know by now that I'm not a programmer (that makes me very sad sometimes and may frustrate some of you at times), but I know a good paper and presentation when I see one. Christopher Bost knows how to teach a topic. I went to his Tuesday

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Anna BrownApril 25, 2012 0

Delta Air Lines uses SAS to prepare for an emergency

Disasters happen every day. Often times they occur at inconvenient hours and in remote locations. So it’s important to have a plan - before the emergency - to get qualified personnel to those locations in the most efficient way. Pilots are an example of qualified personnel who could act as

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsApril 24, 2012 0

Macro for collecting, analyzing and reporting on clickstream data

Today, everyone from chief marketing officers to the senior vice president of sales to bloggers want to know more about the behavior of the readers and consumers who are clicking on Web pages, Internet articles and blogs. Clickstream data is a valuable source of information about the products, services and information that resonates with

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarApril 24, 2012 0

Go home on time with these 5 PROC SQL tips

How can you go home on time? Take a quick tour with these 5 tips that I was able to summarize for my students in the SAS SQL 1: Essentials class yesterday. Since they found it handy and asked if it could become a blog post, I thought I’d share

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallApril 20, 2012 0

What would SAS Stored Process Key #51 be?

This past Monday, Tricia and I released our 2nd book this year. "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" provides a step-by-step approach to transitioning from SAS code into user driven (prompted) stored processes. Trimming down all the things you can do with SAS Stored Processes is next to

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallApril 16, 2012 0

All the possible uses for PROC STP

PROC STP is a new procedure for SAS 9.3 Stored Processes. It's so new and different that I have not had the opportunity to use it yet in a customer engagement. When writing about it for the now released "The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes" book, I had

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerApril 3, 2012 0

Are 64-bit client applications twice as good as 32-bit applications?

In September 2010, I questioned whether you should care about native 64-bit client applications (or the lack thereof). At the time, SAS did not have a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. A skeptical reader might assume that I was just trying to make

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Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinMarch 30, 2012 0

Generate a random matrix with specified eigenvalues

In a previous post I showed how to implement Stewart's (1980) algorithm for generating random orthogonal matrices in SAS/IML software. By using the algorithm, it is easy to generate a random matrix that contains a specified set of eigenvalues. If D = diag(λ1, ..., λp) is a diagonal matrix and

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarMarch 23, 2012 0

What's in a name - SQL Join or SET?

Did that set off a trigger for you? It did for my SAS SQL 1: Essentials class, packed with SQL and SAS programmers alike. To clarify matters I pulled up some examples to help get the differences quickly. Set operators and Joins are similar in that they both combine multiple

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerMarch 23, 2012 0

Improving on a SAS programming pattern

Earlier this week I described a common programming pattern in the SAS macro language. The pattern sets up a loop for processing each distinct value of a classification variable. The program uses the PROC SQL SELECT INTO feature to populate SAS macro variables. The effect: you can roll your own

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerMarch 20, 2012 0

Implement BY processing for your entire SAS program

How to write a SAS macro program to repeat your SAS processing for each value of a BY grouping variable.

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 16, 2012 0

Stop recreating the wheel, save those common joins into a permanent view

When you are constantly taking the data tables and completing joins to begin working on your reports or analysis it might be time to consider creating permanent views. Then you can just add the view to the Enterprise Guide project rather than dealing with the joins in a Query Builder

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 14, 2012 0

Why code when %_eg_WhereParam does the work for you?

After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer's internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Get a quick summary of your data using this task.

Angela HallMarch 7, 2012 0

Use SAS Enterprise Guide to quickly understand a new data set

During IFSUG yesterday, Sunil Gupta gave attendees to his presentation a special homework assignment. Look into the SAS Enterprise Guide task 'Characterize Data'. Sunil suggested that this was a simple approach to quickly getting a summary of all the variables within your data table. Of course, some programmers will use

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallMarch 6, 2012 0

A poor man's approach to fuzzy data matching

Today at IFSUG, Chuck Patridge presented a wonderful talk about how to complete fuzzy matching using BASE SAS tools. Chuck has been programming SAS since 1979 and has been tasked multiple times with coming up with in-house solutions to address business needs without the software costs that are typically associated

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerMarch 1, 2012 0

Numbers great and small: the problem of Big Datum

About once a month, a customer approaches SAS and asks a question of significance. By "significance", I don't necessarily mean "of great importance", but instead I mean "of how SAS handles large numbers, or floating-point values with many significant digits". In response, we always first ask why they asked. This

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarFebruary 27, 2012 0

Do I have to choose between Excel and SAS?

This question came up while helping my presales colleague with a client’s question: “Is Microsoft Excel in direct competition with SAS?” Not really. I like to think of SAS as partnering with Excel. Because of the following Excel benefits and its synergy with SAS. Excel has been around for years.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerFebruary 22, 2012 0

SAS Report: You're soaking in it

Do you want your report to look good on the web, or to look good when you print it? Pick one. Before the SAS Report file format, that was the choice that you faced. HTML is perfect for the web browser. It's easy to scroll through tables, to apply an

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallFebruary 22, 2012 0

To be or not to be, testing your cube's existence

Unlike BASE SAS tables, OLAP cubes must exist in within the metadata in order to access from any of the OLAP Viewers. In addition to having some metadata OLAP cubes have a physical file structure presence (at least for MOLAP/HOLAP because it's a different story for ROLAP). When you refresh

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinFebruary 22, 2012 0

How to compute Mahalanobis distance in SAS

I recently blogged about Mahalanobis distance and what it means geometrically. I also previously showed how Mahalanobis distance can be used to compute outliers in multivariate data. But how do you compute Mahalanobis distance in SAS? Computing Mahalanobis distance with built-in SAS procedures and functions There are several ways to

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarFebruary 13, 2012 0

3 SAS Display Manager shortcuts

How we love shortcuts. Our life seems more efficient with them. I try to take the earlier train for a good parking spot that lets me exit early. Actually change that to any spot (my train station has tons of commuters with FEW parking spaces so getting up early is the

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerFebruary 11, 2012 0

How do I export from SAS to Excel files: Let me count the ways

I have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheet data. I am interested in finding data to analyze, and if it arrives in the form of a spreadsheet, I'll take it. And I like to deliver results and reports, but often my constituents ask for it as a spreadsheet that they can

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallFebruary 9, 2012 0

Best practices for refreshing production OLAP cubes

Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember

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