questions about SAS capabilities

[alandool]

Hi All,

My company is pushing us towards the SAS product. I am trying to determine some of its' capabilities. So, I figure the best way to do that is ask experienced users. Can any of you experts tell me if SAS can do the following?

1. Input from or output to the following platforms: Teradata, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Access Databases, Flat Files (comma delimitted, space/tab delimitted, etc)?

2. Output reports in HTML, Access, Excel, Excel PivotTable, PDF, XML, PowerPoint, and Word formats?

3. Create OLAP reports?

4. Call DOS/Windows scripts?

5. Field re-definition / heavy data manipulation?

6. Schedule jobs/procedures that can be run hourly, daily, weekly, etc. (and the ability to run pre-processing jobs)?

6. Can results from scheduled jobs be automatically distributed thru email, ftp, or various other methods?

7. Create web-based reporting applications that access SAS datasets?

thanks so much,
Alan

 

[ChrisW75]

1 - Yes, however for most of those you'll need to buy SAS/ACCESS which is an additional package. It works seamlessly with SAS so that isn't an issue, however it does add to the price.
2 - Yes to all of those, except Powerpoint. Powerpoint format was never formally released to the development community, so there's no set way to do this. There is a way around it which is long winded involving HTML. SAS comes with ODS (Output Delivery System) which allows writing out data in XML format, in various flavours to allow data to be read natively by most applications and browsers.
3 - No idea. I believe that there is an OLAP Studio add on/package for SAS, but I've never used it or seen it in action. This will be an extra cost again.
4 - Yes, there is an X-Command which allows SAS to run commands in the operating system or DOS shell. SAS can also be run from DOS scripts, which I prefer to do rather than calling DOS scripts from SAS.
5 - Absolutely. This is SAS's bread and butter. I find it easy to use, far easier than using SQL for instance, because it is a procedural language, which makes it a bit more intuitive for some processes. SAS also includes support for ANSI standard SQL for those people/tasks which prefer it.
6 - Yes, once set up correctly, you can specify one or more e-mail addresses as an output destination for SAS datasteps. You can attach files, and use CC and BCC addresses etc. I've used it in the past to e-mail Excel reports directly to the people who want them, and the log file and any notes to myself, all in the same program.
7 - I believe so. I've not actually done this, but I've seen it done. There are once again, add-ons for SAS that allow this sort of work.

My advice is to get a clear idea of the various systems that you want your install of SAS to be able to communicate with, and the various tasks you want to be able to achieve, before going to talk to a SAS rep, they'll then be able to lay out all the components you need, and that sort of thing. You'll also need to know the server/client architecture you'll be running it on.
Anything else you want to know?


Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.

 

[alandool]

Thank you!! Chris. Very informative. Beginning to think no one was going to respond.

Yes, there are a couple of follow-ups.

1. Is there a way to schedule SAS procedures to kick off at certain times of the day on an automatic basis?

2. In a nutshell, what are SAS's three strongest points? From your answers, I'm thinking data manipulation would definitely be one (something we have to have).

Alan

 

[klaz2002]

Using the SAS enteprise guide you can schedule your jobs. What that tool does is write pure vb code and inserts the code/job into the windows scheduler.
You could do this yourself without using the SAS tool but this tool makes it much easier.

SAS's strong points are:
1) Data mining/ Stats
2) Data manipulation
3) Reports

If you have any other q's let us know.
Klaz

 

[alandool]

Thank you, Klaz. Really appreciate the feedback.

One last question. Taking your average programmer/reporting analyst or data analyst, in your opinion, how long would it take to become really proficient/good with SAS -- if they use it on a daily basis?

Alan

 

[ChrisW75]

That's a difficult one to answer, as it depends on the programmer and what training they get and what support they get. My advice would be to get in a core of qualified, experienced SAS programemrs in, and train up the others, and set things up so that they can use the experienced people as mentors. If you've got staff that know data, and are good at working with it, they should be able to pick it up pretty quickly. Within 4 months they should be reasonably proficient. That said, SAS is HUGE, the more you learn, the more you find there is to learn. I've been programming for 8 years and I'm still learning new stuff.
Syntactically, SAS code is similar to VB I always thought, it's pretty straight forwards to work with. Also, with the current tools, SAS Enterprise Guide which comes free with each SAS licence, you can do alot of the basics with drag and drop, then adjust the code if you need to, meaning that remembering the syntax for various commands isn't as important as it used to be.
SAS do a very good course covering the SAS basics, which I've never been on myself (but I've heard good reports from those who have). There are also online courses available, self paced training which is good for some people, and alot cheaper than the course at SAS.
People coming at SAS from a programming background should be able to pick it up pretty damned quickly I would thought, and they'd be your core guys. You also get alot of Analysts who use SAS, they'll get different things out of it, as SAS was originally designed as a Statistical Analysis System, and they'll understand all those bells and whistles, however they tend not to be very structured in their programming, and if you're going to be bringing in analysts, I would recommend pairing them up with someone with a good programming background so that they can learn off each other.
All my original learning in SAS was done on the job after a brief introductory PC based training course, being given jobs to do, then having an experienced programmer go over my code and show me the things I could do better. SAS is a very forgiving language to work in, but that can breed laziness leading to code rot etc.
Going back to the questions thatKlaz already answered, concerning scheduling, alot of the ties in a big organisation, you'll be running SAS in a client/server configuration (SAS will be installed on a server with multiple users connecting in via client applications like Enterprise Guide). In previous places where I've worked like this, we've always run scheduled jobs in other scheduling systems such as BQ Plus on Unix. You set up a shell script to run the job and put that shell script on the relevant queue. I've never been in a position myself to use EGs scheduling due to configuration issues (ie getting the tech guys to set it all up correctly rather than issues with SAS itself).
If you go with SAS, be sure to point your developers here for help! The more people we have, the faster questions will be answered.

Chris
Business Analyst, Code Monkey, Data Wrangler.
SAS Guru.

 

[alandool]

Thanks for taking the time for all the input, Chris. Great info. We use WebFOCUS here now, but as I mentioned, we are being pushed towards SAS (company standard). WebFOCUS is also huge, and the more I've learned about it, the more I seen that I needed to learn. I don't so much mind the switch as long as the functionality we are used to is there. Regardless, having the SAS skillset can only benefit us.

Thanks again.

Alan

 

[dje]

We use SAS as an information delivery tool for a manufacturing environment. The intranet product that SAS offers is a primary tool for us. We use Base, Stat, Graph, Intranet, QC,Stat, FSP, Share, Access to PC file formats, and Access to ODBC. This allows us to generate reports from live databases to monitor our processes in the plant. I am basically a process engineer more so than a programmer and have developed all the programs that we have in place. I use Schedule Wizard ( a 3rd Party software package) to schedule my jobs. I like it because it provides some useful options in the way the jobs are managed. The learning curve is fairly steep if you dont have some good starting points. But progress can go pretty quickly with some examples of similar code.

dje