Tag: SAS

Yet Another Undocumented Feature (new in SAS 9.3)

Today just caught an undocumented SAS feature. I ran the following SAS codes to delete a dataset(in Windows 7 with SAS 9.3): data a; b=1; run; proc datasets noprint; delete a; run; quit; and the dataset was deleted as I expected: 32   proc datasets noprint; 33       delete a; 34   run; NOTE: Deleting WORK.A (memtype=DATA). 35   […]

NOTE: Plan Early and Avoid a Year 2020 Problem!

My friend Stuart Pearson alerted me to a distant but fast approaching issue for some SAS sites. Stuart observed a problem at one of his clients as they were working on forecasts for the next ten years and one of their processes was feeding-in 2 digit…

Giving Focus to Peer Reviews

I’m a keen advocate for peer reviews. I’ve written about them before (here and here) but there’s always more to say.

Peer reviews must always be treated as a constructive exercise. The style of questions can play a big part in the atmosphere and tone …

How to Write a Check? Use SAS Format!

During my initial stay in US last year, one of the interesting exercises was to write a check. The Arabic numerals (the universal language!) were pretty intuitive while I didn’t feel much comfortable on spelling the face value in words: I never played the game! But the good side of this story was, as a […]

Github for Clinical/Statistical Programmers

PhUSE-FDA Working Group 5 (Development of Standard Scripts for Analysis and Programming) just adopted Google Code as collaborative programming platform. Google Code is one of the most popular and respected open source software hosting sites in the world and it is definitely a good choice for PhUSE-FDA WG5. But after viewing one of WG5’s working […]

NOTE: DS2, Final Comments

In my previous posts, I’ve covered many aspects of DS2 (previous posts are listed at the bottom of this post). It’s time to wrap up by offering a few more final details.
Whilst DS2 provides a wide range of data types, not all types are supported by all…

Linguistic Sorting in SAS Proc Sort

Just took a look at the linguistic sorting features in SAS Sort procedure, and got some neat options to apply to my task. For example, I want to sort ID in the following dataset: data t1;     input ID $ ; datalines; T20 T4 T3 T1 ; and want to get such intuitive orderings (files […]

NOTE: DS2, Threaded Processing

In my recent posts on DS2 (DATA step evolved), I showed the basic syntax plus packages & methods, and I showed the use of SQL within a SET statement. In today’s post, I’ll show the biggest raison d’être for DS2 – the ability to run your code in th…