We’ve gone mobile so you can too. Come see us at SAS Global Forum and be one of the first to try our new e-Courses on the tablet! SAS Programming 1 and SAS Programming 2, soon available on your tablet devices, also feature free access to the SAS …
Tag: SAS Global Forum
Hats and apps on tap for my #SASGF13
When I travel to San Francisco in April for SAS Global Forum 2013, it will make my 12th time to attend the international SAS users group conference, and my 7th consecutive year. A lot of people assume that I automatically go every year, but the truth is that SAS employees […]
Favourite Papers from SAS Global Forum 2012
These are some of my favourite papers from SAS Global Forum 2012 last month. I didn’t to get to see as many papers in person as I’d originally planned; we were very busy at our Metacoda stand. So it was great that the papers had already bee…
SAS BI: Does Your Organization Have a BI Strategy?
One of the best things about attending the SAS Global Forum is all the brilliant people you get to meet. Guy Garrett’s presentation about planning a BI strategy was quiet popular and I have to say he was very witty. Turns out implementing a BI strategy is similar to dating – who knew? Anyway – here’s a follow up from Guy – I encourage you to sign-up for the Achieve Intelligence monthly newsletter for more goodies. What is Your BI Strategy? I recently had the pleasure of presenting a paper on “How to Create a Business Intelligence Strategy” at the SAS Global Forum in Orlando. I started off by asking for a show of hands if the organisation the audience worked at had a current existing BI strategy. Out of approx 150 people only 20% put up their hands. I then followed this up with a further question: “Keep your hands up if your BI strategy is documented and accessible so that all information consumers at the organisation know what the strategy is.” Three hands remained. Check the Roadmap! Anyone who has kids knows the heart crunching moment when you’ve just started on a long journey and they say “Are we there yet?”. […]
SAS Global Forum: Here’s the Wrap Up!
SAS Global Forum 2012 was a success! After a whirlwind week of activities followed by a vacation and week of rest – I’m ready to give you some highlights. It was a lot of fun! Tip: Click on any picture to enlarge it. Day 1 – Saturday Ready for the Tweet-Up The biggest drama was at the airport – our flight was delayed due to mechanical failure so I decided it might be better to take a later flight. Met @Steve0verton at the airport and @PhilipB who were both headed to Orlando. As a result of the later flight we were late to the Tweet-Up so we missed the first round of drinks. It was sunset when we landed and the weather was mild – very nice for Florida. We had a lot of fun. @WaynetteTubbs hosted the even and she had a trivia contest. I won a LED key chain and some SAS Post-It notes. I love Post-It notes. Plus I got to meet Anna Maria who writes the sassy Julia Group blog – she’s such a sweetie. And Andrea Wainwright Zimmerman told me that she was the academic chair for SESUG in St. Pete, FL next year. I may have to volunteer […]
SAS OLAP Cubes: Taking Advantage of OLAP Member Properties
Have you ever had a requirement to display additional details about data in a report but couldn’t find a good way to do so? Showing OLAP Member Properties in a SAS Web Report could be a useful way to sneak more details about data into a crosstab table. Crossing Multiple Dimensions with High Cardinality Creates Data Headaches I recently ran into a data challenge with a large OLAP cube (NWAY of about 12 million records) where I needed to summarize a simple count by a “group ID” crossed with a “group name” crossed with another insignificant dimension. There were a large number of “groups” – over a 1000 distinct group IDs with matching group names. Since the cardinality between the “group ID” and “group name” with the source data was pretty high, the OLAP query took a very long time to run and ultimately failed due to a lack of memory. Rather than figuring out how to cross two dimensions with high cardinality (which is not going to be realistic), I used the “group name” to define a member property of the “group ID”. Since the group name had a one-to-one relationship with the group ID, the member property makes sense. […]
The makeup of SAS Global Forum
Question: What do John Travolta, Gina Davis, and I all have in common? (I mean, besides the obvious fact that we are all awesome dancers.) Answer: We have all had makeup applied by artist Roxie Stice. I was the host for two SAS Tech Talks, which were broadcast via Livestream […]
Taking the storyboard approach
A storyboard is a blueprint of drawings/ideas in a specific sequence to illustrate a story. Let’s take the Pixar film Toy Story as an example (I have a two-year-old and admittedly have watched this movie more than the hairs on my head). Before th…