Oracle comments
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Mar 27, 2010
There are two things that annoy me when coping data from other DBs into SAS. One can copy neither indexes nor field’s labels/comments. I don’t know what to do with indexes but there is a workaround for labels/comments.
The problem occurred after creation of the decision tree schema for presentation. There were no labels in the table copied from Oracle. Thus schema contained odd variable names instead of clear descriptions. But there were comments in Oracle but they were not copied with the data.
We decided to copy comments into a separate table and use a data step to set labels in the table with data.
Presenting decision tree
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Mar 14, 2010
Presenting data analysis results to the business people is one of the hardest tasks. One has to avoid technical terms and explain math concepts in simple and clear language. Recently I faced this problem again having to present decision tree model to my director.
The best idea I came up with was to print the decision tree on A2 size paper. The idea worked well because the print attracted a lot of attention and provoked a long discussion. This article is devoted to the tricks to improve the decision tree schema that is created by the SAS Enterprise Miner Decision Tree node.
SAS/Macro. Data step
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Mar 8, 2010
Recently I worked on a data step that creates additional variables in a table that was downloaded from a data warehouse. Those variables were created for data analysis purposes. For instance calculated account age at delinquency can be more important than account start date or date of delinquency.
Maximum levels of 512
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Feb 28, 2010
Working with Enterprise Miner I do often encounter an error “Maximum levels of 512 exceeded”. It occurs after adding new table to the project during the execution of one of the model nodes like decision tree or logistic regression. The reason is that one of the nominal variables has more than 512 different values.
ODBC driver. Excel client
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Feb 21, 2010
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ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) is a technology to connect something (called client) to a database. It is widely used to download data to SAS from other DBs. But one can also use |
ODBC to download data from SAS. For instance one can connect Excel to SAS to copy data from SAS into Excel skipping temporary CSV files or to use Excel as a DWH client.
There is an instruction to configure SAS ODBC driver available on SAS.com. We will follow the instruction and connect Excel to SAS.
