Due largely to the work of Clint Cummins, the sas7bdat file format has become a bit less shrouded. In particular, we now know the following: how to detect files with compressed data (and fail graciously) more details about the platform that generated the file (e.g., endianess, OS details) how to read files that were generated […]
Prompt Framework: SAS Shared Prompts are Scrumpdillyicious!
When I was growing up, a big treat on a Sunday summer afternoon was to drive into town and get a Diary Queen ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. Diary Queen advertised their treats as scrumpdillyicious, which they were to a seven year old! If you are…
NOTE: SAS Mobile BI on Android
I see that SAS Mobile BI is now available in the Google Play store for Android-loving folk like myself in addition to its earlier Apple incarnation. It’s good to see SAS keeping to its promise of supporting multiple platforms.
There’s not been many d…
SAS Administration: Fetch Big Data Faster Across ODBC
On my current “big data” project, I’m connecting SAS to PostgreSQL using the ODBC access engine. At first I was seeing pretty bad performance – specifically I wasn’t able to view the ~2.2 billion sample records I created…
Compute the log-determinant of a matrix
The determinant of a matrix arises in many statistical computations, such as in estimating parameters that fit a distribution to multivariate data. For example, if you are using a log-likelihood function to fit a multivariate normal distribution, the formula for the log-likelihood involves the expression log(det(Σ)), where Σ is the […]
Phone number validation in SAS
In SAS it’s trivial to perform basic validation of a US phone number using a regular expression, and this SAS macro goes way behind the basic validation rules: it checks several rules, in service area codes, directory service, and special ……