Tag: analytics

Will there be analytics for Frankenstorm?

“Frankenstorm” is what the U.S. National Weather Service is calling the combination of Hurricane Sandy, an early winter storm heading east, and a blast of arctic air from the North.   SAS headquarters is located in the middle of the U.S. east c…

SAS Beats R on July 2012 TIOBE Rankings

The TIOBE Community Programming Index ranks the popularity of programming languages, but from a programming language perspective rather than as analytical software (http://www.tiobe.com). It extracts measurements from blogs, entries in Wikipedia, books on Amazon, search engine results, etc. and combines them into a single index. … Continue reading

Why R is Hard to Learn

The open source R software for analytics has a reputation for being hard to learn. It certainly can be, especially for people who are already familiar with similar packages such as SAS, SPSS or Stata. Training and documentation that leverages … Continue reading

SAS Altlog option

If you run a production SAS environment or even a development environment for that matter, it is nice to have a specific location for all logs to be written and managed. ALTLOG helps achieve this. The ALTLOG option can be set numerous ways, but we typically utilize 2. 1. As an option on the command […]

SQL tip – Inner join shorthand with USING

We write a LOT of SQL here and although SQL is a powerful database language, it can be tedious. So here is one tip for shortening all that typing. Typical join sytax: select some_columns from one_table join another_table on one_table.column_1 = another_table.column_1 and one_table.column_2=another_table.column_2 where some_column > someother_column ; Not too bad, right? In order for […]

SAS / Teradata Fastexport – dbsliceparm = all

Fastexport is the fastest way to get large data out of teradata. Fastexport utilizes multiple connections to deliver data and therefore speeding up the transfer of data between Teradata and SAS. Here are a few examples of fastexport. /* libname statement*/ libname teradb  teradata username=&un password=&pw dbsliceparm=all; /* explicit sql */ proc sql; connect to […]

I <3 STATISTICS

Like John Sall, I’m wearing my “I <3 STATISTICS” pin today… and I’m not even a statistician. When I tell new acquaintances that I work at SAS, I usually get one of these responses: “Oh that’s nice. I’ve never heard of them.” “Oh that’s nice…