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Tips and Tricks from the SAS Global Forum 2012

MONSUG - May 25th 2012

By Eric Lacombe, Director, Professional Services

CLEARGOALS Company

May 25th 2012

Agenda Overview

Agenda

Copyright 2012 CLEARGOALS 3 Confidential

Selection Process

Goal of the Presentation

Insights from the 10 Selected Papers

Conclusion

Selection Process

Selection Process

411 papers in pdf format – read twice the abstracts

Down to 87 papers – read twice (and more) the detailed papers

Down to 30 down to 13 down to 11 down to 10

A lot of interesting material

Difficult to make a choice

Tried to pick quick win paper content

Tried to reach a broad audience with various paper subjects


Goal of the Presentation

Goal

Provide an overview of the paper

And

Provide a few tricks from the paper


Insights from the 10 Selected Papers

Insights – Paper #1

Section: Coders’ Corner

Paper 047-2012

Working the System: Our Best SAS® Options

Patrick Thornton, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA

Iuliana Barbalau, Adecco, Pleasanton, CA

• http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings12/047-2012.pdf

Copyright 2012 CLEARGOALS Confidential 9

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings12/047-2012.pdf




• Discussion on beneficial and interesting options



• Option : PDFSECURITY



• Options : MCOMPILE, MCOMPILENOTE (New in SAS 9.2)



Section: Programming: Foundations and Fundamentals

Paper 241-2012

A Survey of Some of the Most Useful SAS® Functions

Ron Cody, Camp Verde, Texas







• Covered Functions:

– LENGTHN, LENGTHC – MISSING, CALL MISSING ROUTINE – INPUT, PUT – FIND, FINDC – COMPRESS – SUBSTR – SCAN – UPCASE, LOWCASE, PROPCASE – TRANWRD – SPEDIS – TRIMN, STRIP – NOTALPHA, NOTDIGIT, NOTALNUM – CATS, CATX – COUNT, COUNTC – MDY, MONTH, WEEKDAY, DAY, YEAR, YRDIF – ARRAY – N,NMISS, SUM, MEAN – SMALLEST, LARGEST – LAG – CALL SORTN ROUTINE



• COMPRESS function



• Example – Program

– Output



• PROPCASE function – stands for proper case

– capitalizes the first character in each "word" and sets the remaining letters to lowercase.

Program

Output



Section: Programming: Beyond the Basics

Paper 227-2012

Executing a PROC from a DATA Step

Jason Secosky, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC







• Detailed paper on how to execute a PROC from a DATA step

• In SAS 9.2, RUN_MACRO enables DATA step code to immediately execute a macro an act on the result

• In SAS 9.3, SAS introduced the DOSUBL function

– Experimental function that executes SAS code directly from a DATA step

– Unlike RUN_MACRO, DOSUBL can be called directly from a DATA step without the need for a user-written function

– Character value required



• DOSUBL function – Code example

– You can use the DATA step OPEN and FETCH functions to open and read the resulting dataset WORK.REGIONS.



Section: SAS Enterprise Guide® Implementation and Usage

Paper 301-2012

Productivity Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide® Users

Jennifer First and Steven First, Systems Seminar Consultants, Madison, WI,

United States









• The paper covers

– EG OPTIONS • PROJECT VIEWS

• RESULTS

• DATA AND QUERY OPTIONS

• EDITOR OPTIONS

• LAYOUT OPTIONS

– ORGANIZING SAS PROCESSES • DOCUMENTATION

• MULTIPLE PROCESS FLOWS

• PROCESS FLOW ORGANIZATION

– LEVERAGING POINT AND CLICK FUNCTIONALITY • QUERY BUILDER



• ORGANIZING SAS PROCESSES – DOCUMENTATION

• The Note

• A text document where a user can type details

• It will appear as a project node in the Process Flow and the Project Tree

• A best practice in EG is to create a Note linked to each task used in the Project



• Example of a note associated with a task that documents the task



• LEVERAGING POINT AND CLICK FUNCTIONALITY

– QUERY BUILDER

• JOINING TABLE

– Up to 32 tables

– The user doesn’t need to worry about correctly spelling variable names correctly

– Saves time

– Grab the generated code to modify it later



• Example of code generated by the Query Builder



• LEVERAGING POINT AND CLICK FUNCTIONALITY

– Easy to create graphs

• Creating graphs from SAS Coding can often be time consuming and cumbersome

• In the past, many SAS users have even exported their results to Excel to create their graphs

– Easy to create processes that are difficult to code

• Leverage the task

• For example, the Summary Tables Task (generated PROC TABULATE code)



• Example of a Summary Tables Task (PROC TABULATE)



Section: Posters

Paper 217-2012

Wake up your data with Graph’n’Go

Christopher Battiston, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada









• Unknown feature to create graphs and visualize data

• Easy to use, powerful, flexible

• Can output to SAS and modify the code

• Available since SAS 8

• Requires SAS/Graph

• To start the tool – Go to Solutions and then Reporting



• How-to

– Select data



• How-to

– Change some of the characteristics of the graph



• How-to

– The completed set of graphs



• How-to

– Export the code (PROC GCHART)



Section: Hands-on Workshops

Paper 153-2012

Quick Results with SAS® ODS Graphics Designer

Sanjay Matange, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC









• Don’t need to know the SG Procedures (ODS Graphics Procedures)

• Interactive ‘drag-and-drop’ process

• Released with the 3rd maintenance release for SAS 9.2

• Part of the SAS/GRAPH product

• Starting with SAS 9.3, the designer became available as part of Base SAS

• The designer is based on Graph Template Language (GTL)

– Used to create analytical graphs produced by the SAS analytical procedures

• Can save the graph to a file or a gallery

• Possibility to run the designer graphs in batch



• GETTING STARTED 1. Submit the %sgdesign macro in the Program Editor

2. With SAS 9.3, you can start the designer from the Tools -> ODS Graphics Designer menu entry



• THE DESIGNER APPLICATION INTERFACE



• Distribution of Hamilton Scores in 14 easy steps



• Survival Plot



• Classification Panel



Section: Programming: Foundations and Fundamentals

Paper 259-2012

Graphing Made Easy with SG Procedures

Lora D. Delwiche, University of California, Davis, CA

Susan J. Slaughter, Avocet Solutions, Davis, CA









• New in SAS 9.2 as a part of SAS/GRAPH

• Included in Base SAS in SAS 9.3

• New way of generating graphs using SAS

• 3 basic Statistical Graphics (SG) procedures (SGPLOT, SGPANEL, SGSCATTER)

• SGPLOT

– Can produce 18 different types of graphs (bar charts, histograms and density plots, scatter plots)

• The paper gives all the possible options that can be used with the procedures

• Possibility to save the ODS GRAPHICS output and access individual graphs



• PROC SGPLOT Examples



Section: Statistics and Data Analysis

Paper 313-2012

Look Out: After SAS/STAT® 9.3 Comes SAS/STAT 12.1!

Maura Stokes, Fang Chen, Yang Yuan, and Weijie Cai

SAS Institute, Inc. Cary NC








• This paper reviews the highlights of the new release and illustrates them with practical examples

• New release-numbering scheme • Expect more frequent releases of SAS/STAT software (each 12-18 months) • SAS/STAT 9.3 became available in 2011

– Introduces the experimental FMM procedure which fits statistical models to date where the distribution of the response is a finite mixture of univariate distributions

– The MI procedure added the FCS statement, which specifies a multivariate imputation by fully conditional specification (FCS) methods

– The NLIN procedure was updated with features for diagnosing the nonlinear model fit. The SURVEYPHREG procedure became production and now handles time-dependent covariates

– The MCMC procedure added a RANDOM statement, which simplifies the specification of hierarchical random-effects models and significantly reduces simulation time while improving convergence



• The upcoming SAS/STAT 12.1 emphasizes modern regression methods

– The new QUANTSELECT procedure for quantile regression model selection works similarly to the GLMSELECT procedure

– The new QUANTLIFE procedure performs quantile regression for censored data

– The new ADAPTIVEREG procedure provides flexible regression model for high-dimensional data

– In addition, epidemiologists will benefit from the new STDRATE procedure, which computes direct and indirect standardized rates and risks for study populations

– The FMM procedure for finite mixture models becomes production, and Bayesian analysis capabilities are also updated



• A number of existing procedures have also had important updates

– WEIGHT statement in PROC LIFETEST

– case-level (observation-level) residual diagnostics with latent variables in PROC CALIS

– partial R-square for relative importance of parameters in PROC LOGISTIC

– Miettinen-Nurminen confidence limits for the difference of proportions in PROC FREQ

– Poisson sampling in PROC SURVEYSELECT

– group sequential design with nonbinding acceptance boundary in the SEQDESIGN and SEQTEST procedures

– post-stratification estimation in the SURVEYMEANS procedure

– REF= option added to the CLASS statement for GLM, MIXED, GLIMMIX, and ORTHOREG procedures



Section: Systems Architecture and Administration

Paper 366-2012

Logging 101: Leveraging the SAS Enhanced Logging Facility

Margaret Crevar, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA

Tony Brown, SAS Institute Inc., Dallas, TX USA








• Beginning with SAS 9.2, a new, enhanced logging facility was incorporated into Base SAS

• This facility provides the ability to finely tune the capturing of log and audit information about SAS activity

• Since the captured data is stored in external files, SAS programmers can use SAS 4GL language statements in custom-coded programs to report on this data

• The enhanced logging features classify messages according to audit, performance, administration, and application namespaces, as well as by diagnostic levels such as trace, information, error, warning, and fatal

• Through the use of appenders, administrators can direct messages to customized output destinations such as the Windows Event Viewer, UNIX system logs, the z/OS system logger, or an operator’s console



• Can gather statistics from Enterprise BI Applications or ad hoc and batch processes

• For the SAS batch jobs

– The collection of information from these processes requires that the logging facility be turned on globally for all SAS processes

– Can be done with a global AUTOEXEC.SAS file that is used by all SAS sessions. You simply add the logging facility autocall macros to the top of the ad hoc or batch SAS program code for each job

– The MAUTOSOURCE system option must be set and the %LOG4SAS autocall macro must be invoked before any other logging facility autocall macros are invoked

– Placing this autocall macro within the job automatically creates the appropriate logging information



• The SAS Audit, Performance and Measurement package acquires the data collected by the enhanced logging facility and uses it to create predefined sample reports that can help SAS and IT administrators understand how SAS is being used on their various computer hardware systems

• Reports such as Most Heavily Used Datasets/Directories, Top 10 Reports/OLAP Cubes/Users, and SAS PROC Usage are just examples of the types of reporting that can be done

• The information can easily be expanded to cover the complete set of computer resources being used by SAS

• The information can even be used as input to internal chargeback systems



• A sample Web application included with the SAS Audit, Performance and Measurement package reports on the SAS Enterprise BI content (such as reports, data, and projects) that are accessed by individual SAS Enterprise Guide processes. It also reports on the resulting computer resource consumption

• Some case study examples are available in the paper

– Available disk space in the SAS WORK file system

– SAS Metadata Server



• The SAS Audit, Performance and Measurement Package with the Usage Reports Highlighted



• SAS 9.3 Additions to the SAS Audit, Performance and Measurement Package



Section: Programming: Data Management

Paper 115-2012

What’s New in SAS/ACCESS®

and Process Improvements to Apply to Your DBMS

Howard Plemmons, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC








• This paper provides an overview of major new features in SAS/ACCESS and looks at process improvements that can help with DBMS performance

• The paper contains enhancements that are in SAS 9.3M1 and what is being developed and slated for SAS 9.3M2

• Supported Interfaces and Platforms



• For SAS 9.3M1, SAS has provided additional parse/textualization processes to support implicit pass-through SQL. These components were added to PROC SQL to enable push-down of processing into the DBMS

• The DBIDIRECTEXEC option must be set



• SAS/ACCESS ENGINE READ PERFORMANCE - pipeline data reads

– This feature is slated for SAS 9.3M2

– The Pipeline read feature is designed to give the user an automated way to gain read performance without having to tweak and experiment with the READBUFF option

– The more you process data in SAS, the faster it can be pipelined into the SAS/ACCESS read process



• Performance With and Without Pipeline Read


Conclusion

Conclusion

• Feel free to present a paper or a book that you have read or a presentation or a video that you have seen

• Feel free to contact me for additional information and questions on the presentation

LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/ericlacombe


http://ca.linkedin.com/in/ericlacombe

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