What’s The Idea?

The easy part is done: code got written, various technical barriers were overcome, a prototype was built, and the proof-of-concept was proven.Now the hard part: figuring out if the concept is even a good idea or not. Of course, _I_ think it’s a good i…

Syntactic sugar – 6 SAS essentials

The 25 boys I teach on Sundays loved these cupcakes I baked for them for Easter… the sugared peeps had them completely satisfied. I love my tea or coffee laced with sugar. I think you‘d all agree that it is always more pleasant to meet a nice custo…

SAS Coding: 3 Data Set Tricks in PROC SQL

Maybe you are like me and your SAS programs frequently bounce from PROC SQL to data steps depending on the task at hand. Some things you cannot do in PROC SQL as easily as the data step and vice versa.  Here’s 3 data set tricks that I have successfully used with PROC SQL.  These are some time savers that you can use in your work.  However, if you know some others add them in the Comments section – I double-dare you.   Trick #1: Drop and Keep Options You can use the DROP and KEEP options on the FROM or CREATE statements. This is handy when you want to exclude or include a list of variables.  Consider this example where I saved myself some typing because I know the only variable I don’t want is country. Otherwise I would have had to type out all of the other variables just to exclude a single one. proc sql; create table Newtable  as    select * from sashelp.prdsal2(drop=country);quit;  Trick #2: Limit the Observations OBS allows you to control the number of observations input to the procedure.  I would use this if I had a particularly large data table and I just needed to test […]

Second Birthday

It’s PlatformAdmin.com’s 2nd birthday this week! The past 2 years have gone very quickly I must say. I set out with a goal of writing a least 1 post every month. Not very ambitious I know, but realistic for me nonetheless! I’ve never …