I recently encountered a SUGI30 paper by Chuck Kincaid entitled “Guidelines for Selecting the Covariance Structure in Mixed Model Analysis.” I think Kincaid does a good job of describing some common covariance structures that are used in mixed models. One of the many uses for SAS/IML is as a language […]
Debugging With Six Sigma Ishikawa
Back in September 2009 (that seems so long ago!) I wrote an article on problem solving using the 5 Whys technique. Some correspondents suggested that 5 Whys was a trivial/obvious technique, but they were missing the point somewhat – sometim…
Breakthroughs in the sas7bdat Reverse Engineering Effort
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…