The art of listening is one of the most valuable skills for a leader. Whether you’re a team leader, technical lead, or simply more experienced than some of your colleagues, you’ll gain a great deal by doing an appropriate proportion of listening relati…
NOTE: When WORK is not WORK
When you code a one-level data set name, i.e. a data set name with no libname specified, you probably expect it to be read or written from/to the WORK library, but that might not be so. Read on…
Subject to the value of the USER= option, one-level da…
Do you use SAS for analytics and Excel for graphs?
Do you use SAS for analytics and Microsoft Excel for graphs? Why not use SAS for your graphs too?!? Then you could completely automate the entire process in one SAS program, with no manual steps! A lot of people use Excel to create their graphs be…
The hottest trends in analytics
Leading up to the Analytics 2012 Conference, we’re going to explore the latest trends in analytics. For this, we reached out to several of our speakers and sponsors to get their take on what’s catching fire. The one we found on almost everyone’s …
Testing recommendations for SAS BI Dashboard & SAS Web Report Studio
With limited time and budget, you can still thoroughly test SAS reports built in SAS BI Dashboard and SAS Web Report Studio by considering how all the tools were used to build the end report. An understanding of the functionality within each part of th…
SAS Code: Simple Macro to Benchmark Data Performance
When troubleshooting data performance problems, IO problems, or simple library connectivity, I use a simple snippet of code to push the data storage to the limits. It is useful because it stresses the data storage component, whether it be a SAS dataset on local file storage or an external database like Oracle, and it provides useful performance metrics. To make it even better, since this is a SAS Macro it can easily be called multiple times for different libraries by setting the 2 parameters in the %BENCHMARK() macro. Data Benchmark Macro Code The following code will take the CLASS dataset from the SASHELP library and continually append a specified number of iterations. Be sure to include the OPTIONS statement to get the vital statistics in the log. [crayon-502242bf5ab3d/] Output This is the output produced when the FULLSTIMER option is set. These statistics were produced on my laptop with a solid state drive. NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time): real time 15.08 seconds user cpu time 13.55 seconds system cpu time 1.45 seconds memory 414561.92k OS Memory 439844.00k Timestamp 08/01/2012 11:00:11 PM How fast can you run this code? Remember to set […]