I have a love-hate relationship with spreadsheet data. I am interested in finding data to analyze, and if it arrives in the form of a spreadsheet, I’ll take it. And I like to deliver results and reports, but often my constituents ask for it as a spreadsheet that they can […]
managing projects using RStudio
We’re continually amazed with new developments within RStudio, the integrated developed environment for R that we highlighted previously (Among others, Andrew Gelman agrees with us about its value). The most recent addition addresses one of our earlie…
On Unpublished Software
sciseekclaimtoken-4f343317d3d60 I ran across this post at The Tree of Life entitled ‘Interesting new metagenomics paper w/ one big big big caveat – critical software not available”. The long and short of it? Paper appears in Science, has fancy new methodology, lacks the software for someone else to use their methodology. Blog author understandably annoyed. But I […]
Checking return codes for errors in SAS
You should check for error return codes in any SAS programs that run unattended in batch jobs, so you can handle the exception properly. For example, if the data are invalid, you don’t want to generate reports or insert bad data into a database. …
Cholesky decomposition to "expand" data
Yesterday Rick showed how to use Cholesky decomposition to transform data by the ROOT function of SAS/IML. Cholesky decomposition is so important in simulation. For those DATA STEP programmers who are not very familiar with SAS/IML, PROC FCMP in SAS m…
Best practices for refreshing production OLAP cubes
Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administ…