If you have taken a SAS Deployment exam in the past 9-12 months, you may have wondered why there are pre-test test questions. While it might seem like I am providing warmer-upper questions out of the goodness of my heart, these pre-test tests are actually called candidate surveys. Their purpose? […]
The post Beyond the Credential: What’s up with the test before the test? appeared first on SAS Learning Post.
These days SAS programmers have more choices than ever before about how to run SAS. They can use the old Display Manager interface, or SAS Enterprise Guide, or the new kid on the block: SAS Studio. All of these are included with Base SAS. Once upon a time, the only choices were Display Manager (officially […]
In celebration of SAS Global Forum, the folks at SAS Press gathered tips from SAS Press authors. Here is my contribution: This is the best time ever to learn SAS! When I first encountered SAS, there were only two ways that I could get help. I could either ask another graduate student who might or […]
I’m on my way back from SAS® Global Forum 2016 (#SASGF), where I heard all about the all new SAS Viya™ platform, and the next exciting thing on my agenda is attending Chris Hemedinger’s course Developing Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide in Sydney on 3-4 May (it’s also on in Melbourne on 5-6 May). … Continue reading “Next Up: SAS Enterprise Guide Custom Tasks Course in Sydney”
SAS Global Forum 2016 is over. Thousands of conference attendees are now back home. Much of the conference was live-streamed, but if you missed it, that’s all right because many of the best sessions were recorded. However, finding particular videos can be tricky. So, here are my favorites. Click the heading to link to […]
Each year I update the growth in R’s capability on The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. And each year, I think R’s incredible rate of growth will finally slow down. Below is a graph of the latest data, and as … Continue reading →
SAS Global Forum 2016 is just over 2 weeks away, and I’m really excited about showing a Permissions Tracer feature we’ll be releasing in the next version of our Metacoda Security Plug-ins. Metacoda is a SASGF sponsor again this year and we’ll be showing a preview of this new version at our Metacoda stand in … Continue reading “Tracing Permissions for SAS Metadata Security”
Any automated program should check for errors and unexpected conditions, such as inability to access a resource and presence of invalid values. Unlike traditional programming languages such as Python and C# that stop processing when an error occurs, SAS barrels ahead through the rest of the program. Therefore, carelessly-written SAS programs can create unwanted side effects, such as overwriting an output data set with bad data.
Previously I wrote about a robust solution for checking SAS error codes which wraps the entire program in a macro and invokes %GOTO EXIT in case an error. This is still the ideal solution when some part of the program must continue, but it comes at a cost: wrapping SAS code in a macro disables syntax highlighting in the SAS Enhanced Editor (though not in SAS Studio). Also, it can be awkward to work with the large code block delimited by the macro, so this post focuses on two alternatives.
For more posts like this, see Heuristic Andrew.