Vice President’s blog
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Jan 5, 2010
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Jim Davis, SAS Senior Vice president has visited Russia to attend SAS Forum Russia 2009. You can read about his impression of Russia and Moscow in his blog. |
Documentation. Functions
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Jan 3, 2010
| SAS has a lot of built in functions. I do never learn their names. If I use a function frequently it stands the test of time and etches in my memory. If don’t remember function’s name I look it up in Help. When I just started programming SAS I used Help Search tab for that. When I was looking how to concatenate |
strings I typed “concatenate strings” in the Search field and pushed the List Topics button and found “Functions and Call Routines CATX function” link.
Competing on Analytics
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Dec 19, 2009
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The book “Competing on Analytics” that I recommend is being translated into Russian. Reprinting of the book is another sign that it is worth reading. You can find review of this book on the “Books” page. One can also read the article that the book is based on — “Competing on Analytics”. |
Enterprise Miner vs SAS/STAT
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Dec 15, 2009
From a conversation:
– Wait. So, where is Data Mining implemented?
– Look here (drawing). Initially they developed Base SAS then SAS/STAT and SAS/OR. These are libraries if math algorithms developed using C language. Later they developed Enterprise Miner using Java. EM is just a set of wizards that run procedures in SAS/STAT and SAS/OR. Knowing the procedures EM runs one can run those procedures without EM.
– In other words EM creates Base SAS code and runs it in SAS.
– Yes, that is right.
– So, do you refuse to use EM at all?
– Well, No. Sometimes I use EM to build decision trees manually.
– OK. Then what EM was developed for?
– Good question. One can also ask what EG was developed for?
– It is easy to develop reports in EG. Three clicks and it is ready.
– I can create report using Base SAS. Three lines of code and report is ready. The thing is that there are people that don’t like coding. I do like coding and I do it well. EM and EG were developed for those who don’t know about SAS/STAT or don’t like to code.
Text mining log files
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Dec 13, 2009
The problem described in this article was solved during the DWH optimization project. At the beginning of the project the DWH was too slow and users often complained that it takes too much time to execute a query. We have started DWH optimization with the development of a set of indexes. There were very few indexes at that time.
One should create indexes for those tables that are read most often. The problem is that many SAS DBA’s don’t know how often the tables are queried. We also had neither data schema nor lists of users and tables that users have access to.
Pass-Through Facility
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Oct 8, 2009
Recently I have found a troublesome bug in a pass-through facility (PTF). PTF allows one to connect to remote DB, to write code in its language and to send it to remote DB for execution. After execution the results are sent back to SAS. Therefore you can access all the features of the remote DB language as well as to the stored procedures. For instance once we used PTF and stored procedure to get history of accounts’ balances from the Automatic Banking System DB and improved data quality in the Data Warehouse.
SAS products overview
Posted by Oleg Solovyev on Jun 6, 2009
Before discussing SAS software let’s consider two terms that SAS is actively using describing its software. The terms are “product” and “solution”. “Product” is the irreducible software that performs one particular function. For instance products are: DBMS’s, clients’ for DBMS, web portals, etc. “Solution” is a set of products that automates process in a particular business field. SAS for instance has solutions for banking, Telco, insurance, etc. As a rule, solutions contain predefined database schema, user interface and reports optimized for a particular task.
