Right now, grid computing is one of the hottest topics here at SAS. To get more information about the technology and how people can get trained in it, I talked to Nancy Goodyear who manages e-Learning products at SAS. What is grid computing? Grid compu…
Dice probabilities and the game of "craps"
Gambling games that use dice, such as the game of “craps,” are often used to demonstrate the laws of probability. For two dice, the possible rolls and probability of each roll are usually represented by a matrix. Consequently, the SAS/IML language makes it easy to compute the probabilities of various […]
SAS and VBA (6) : delete empty rows
One tricky question of the data work is to delete empty rows/observations in a raw file. A code snippet is particular useful to handle such cases. At the mean time, we need to know how many rows are actually removed as the execution result. In this dem…
Using SAS to convert IP addresses into numerical IP values
As citizens of the Internet, we are all familiar with IP addresses — probably more so than our Internet founding fathers had ever intended. These addresses are typically represented in a 4-piece segmented list of numbers separated by dots. Here is an example: “149.173.5.120”. Each segment is called an octet […]
Million dollar buffets, gravity-defying stunts and big data – it’s all at Analytics 2012
Did you know that 17 of the 20 biggest hotels in the U.S. are in Las Vegas? Everything in Sin City seems larger than life — so it makes sense that we would host one of the largest analytics conferences right in the middle of the action. We know the [….
SAS Administration: Process Data Faster in RDBMS by Buffering the Data in Memory
By default, accessing third party relational databases can be very slow if not configured properly. I recently started using PostgreSQL 9.1, an open source database, to store high volumes of data for my SAS Global Forum 2013 paper. At first it was taking forever to load up data because SAS was inserting 1 row at a time into the database table. After adding a simple option my data processing was off to the races! Buffering Options The SAS INSERTBUFF and READBUFF options will improve ODBC and OLE DB libraries dramatically. By default these are set to 1 and 250 rows respectively for ODBC connections. Other third party databases, such as Oracle, DB2, or MS SQL Server, will probably benefit as well but I have not been able to test. Setting these buffer sizes tells SAS how many rows to buffer in memory before processing. Using the LIBNAME Option These options can be added to the LIBNAME statement to set the buffering sizes for all processing done on tables within the library. Ideally if you have the SAS Metadata server running, your SAS Administrator should set these options through the Data Library manager in SAS Management Console. If you are […]
The post SAS Administration: Process Data Faster in RDBMS by Buffering the Data in Memory appeared first on Business Intelligence Notes for SAS® BI Users.