SAS Tech Report

April 2018
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Dear Reader,

Every other summer my family gathers in Buffalo, NY, for a family reunion. Though I left the area when I was 10, it still feels a lot like home. I look forward to seeing my sister and approximately 500 aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins – and that’s only a slight exaggeration. Still, it pales in comparison to the family reunion I attend around this time every year. It’s called SAS® Global Forum.

OK, so maybe they’re not technically my relatives, but SAS users certainly make you feel like one of the family. It seems like every user event I’ve been to (and I’ve been to many) is a gathering of best friends, and I’m always impressed by how friendly everyone is to each other. It’s clear SAS users are part of a well-connected community and enjoy being in each other’s company and learning from one another.

That was especially true about SAS Global Forum 2018 in Denver on April 8-11. This year approximately 5,500 SAS “kin” attended the event, and I think I met about 5,200 of you. It was an honor learning about the incredible work you’re doing with SAS, and incredibly flattering to meet fans of this newsletter. Several attendees I spoke with called the event “the best SAS Global Forum ever,” and I couldn’t agree more. The talks were top-notch, networking opportunities well planned, and it was really exciting to hear from Jim Goodnight, Oliver Schabenberger, Randy Guard, Stuart Nisbet and several other SAS executives.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend SAS Global Forum, I thought I’d use this month’s SAS Tech Report to share some resources to help you get a little taste of the event.

For starters, take a look at the SAS Global Forum 2018 conference proceedings. The proceedings contain every formal paper and e-poster, along with the accompanying presentation slides and other materials. You can search the proceedings by topic, product, industry, skill level and job role. You’re sure to find a number of helpful talks, and you can download any you’d like.

If you’re more of a visual learner, you can view a number of sessions on demand from the SAS Global Forum 2018 Video Portal. Here you’ll find many of the general sessions, including Opening Session and several keynotes, a number of breakout sessions, Chris Hemedinger’s always-popular Tech Talks, and select interviews with several SAS executives, customers and users.

And it’s never too early to start planning to attend next year’s event. SAS Global Forum 2019 is scheduled for April 28-May 1 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas. Be sure to block your calendar!

So thanks for making SAS Global Forum such a fun family gathering. In fact, it was probably even better than the LaRusso gatherings I enjoy so much. Great food, awesome company, stimulating conversations, AND no one pinching my cheeks and telling me how much I’ve grown. Yeah, probably better.

Thanks for reading,

Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Tech Report
Follow me @lalaru102

SAS® Tips and Tricks

Working with big data in SAS®

In this blog post and paper from SAS Global Forum 2018, SAS Jedi Mark Jordan shares some rules to help build better ad hoc programs in day-to-day programming tasks. He also demonstrates how to detect common problems if your code is running longer than expected so you can tune your SAS processes for better performance.

SAS® Visual Analytics 8.2 on SAS® Viya®: Getting started

SAS Viya is an open, cloud-enabled, in-memory platform that delivers accurate results. It’s also an underlying foundation for several SAS solutions, including SAS Visual Analytics. In this Ask the Expert webinar, you’ll learn how to explore in-memory data; present data and results in the most compelling way; create interactive reports and dashboards; and more. Join live or view on demand.

How to execute a Python script in SAS® Enterprise Miner™

In this video SAS Sr Machine Learning Developer Ruiwen Zhang presents a new and effective method to execute Python scripts in SAS Enterprise Miner.

Find the distances between observations and a target value

Suppose you want to find observations in multivariate data that are closest to a numerical target value. The way to do this is to compute a distance from each observation to the target. Unfortunately, there are many definitions of distance. This post describes and compares a few common distances and shows how to compute them in SAS.

Fixing multiple length problems when merging data sets

Many times multiple data sets in a library need to be merged, but because they were created from different text files or spreadsheets, some variables will have different lengths in different data sets. This can cause truncation of data or a failure to match when merging. This program inspects each data set in a library, finds all of the character variables and finds the maximum length of that variable in any data set.

Plotting time series data

Graphic visualization of time series variables is helpful in identifying and interpreting relationships in data. High resolution color graphics plots convey the information quickly and concisely. This example makes use of the ODS graphics for PROC ARIMA and compares them to the graphics produced using the GPLOT procedure.

An introduction to SAS® Visual Forecasting 8.2

In this blog post you’ll learn how to build a SAS Visual Forecasting Pipeline, which is a process flow diagram whose nodes represent tasks in the SAS Visual Forecasting Process. The objective is to show you how to perform the full analytics life cycle with large volumes of data, including accessing data, assigning variable roles accurately, building forecasting models, selecting a champion model and overriding the system-generated forecast.

From SAS® Communities

Pre and post tasks for maintenance releases

SAS user dgower2 poses a common question for administrators: “I'm about to install M5 for SAS. When installing hotfixes using the hotfix tool, an HTML report is generated where I can click on the individual hotfixes to see pre and post hotfix tasks. How do I find the pre and post tasks when updating to M5 (from M3)?” The community responds.

Test your data cleansing skills

The "Data Cleansing Challenge" provides a real-world scenario for you to practice cleaning and organizing data. You will use your SAS knowledge, documentation and problem solving skills to complete the challenge. In this challenge you will be working with earthquake data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. First you’ll have to clean the data and then use the clean data set to separate the valid observations from the invalid ones.

Traditional SAS® programming versus SQL

It's a question as old as SAS itself. Especially when you think about the fact that SQL was first created by IBM back in 1975, and SAS was incorporated in 1976. Coincidence? Yes. But it's not a coincidence that both languages have prevailed until this day. Read more in this SAS Communities post.

SAS® News

Submit your speaking proposal for Analytics Experience

Have you used innovative SAS techniques to transform data into intelligence at your organization? Then why not help your peers learn new perspectives and skills by presenting at Analytics Experience 2018 in San Diego on Sept. 17-19? As a presenter, your registration and travel costs will be covered. Submissions accepted through May 3.

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