Han Oostdijk Quantitative Consultancy

SAS

Most of the work I did with SAS was in the MVS/XA mainframe environment. Often files were made available in the form of DB2 tables that could easily be read with 'proc sql'. Joins could be done in either the SAS or the DB2 environment. Tape files were read with a batchjob containing a 'datastep' reading the records and splitting them in fields. In principal SAS runs code sequentially but using macros code segements can be omitted or executed several times. In this way we could construct applications of individual 'proc' and 'datastep' components.

SAS is a very well known programming environment for statistical calculations and available for all hardware platforms. SAS/Base contains all the functionality needed for reading, manipulating and reporting of files. The main functionality are the numerous procedures that can be applied on SAS-files (e.g. creating a report in table format with 'proc freq'). For the creation of SAS-files one uses the 'data step' in which a powerful programming language is available. On top of these procedures and the 'data step' I like to apply the macro facility that facilitates the support and administration of applications.

Most of the time SAS/BASE will be enough for analyses but when graphs are needed also SAS/Graph is necessary and for more special statistical work the component SAS/Stat.
And then SAS also has Solutions: programming environments that build on SAS/base and specialized procedures that provide business solutions for particular fields such as e.g. Operational Risk Management.

	The official website of SAS. Here you will find links to all the products of SAS. The logic behind the packaging of these products is not yet clear to me. It was only after some clicking that I found that the SAS modules I am most interested in (the ones mentioned above) are packaged in the SAS Visual Data Discovery. But of course the Sales department is more than happy to be of service ;).
	Documentation of SAS/Base and all procedures. The documentation is one of the main assets of SAS. It is often available as online help and HTML and PDF format so that the format can be chosen that is most suitable at the time.
	The website of the SAS Global Forum is very useful because the papers of the participants of the yearly conferences can be downloaded. They often contain 'real world' examples of techniques.
	An interesting usenet newsgroup is 'comp.soft-sys.sas'. All aspects of the use of SAS are discussed (among others homework questions of undergraduates). Reading the postings you often find alternative ways to solve problems. The link presented here use the Google Groups search engine but also newsgroup readers (see e.g. Comparison_of_Usenet_newsreaders) or Thunderbird and Outlook Express can be used. The newsgroup has no direct link with the SAS company.
	World Programming System (WPS) offers an interpreter for the SAS language and for the Windows environment a workbench based on Eclipse that can be used for creating, modifying, debugging and maintaining programs written in the language of SAS. SAS/Base is supported for a large part but other components are not. The documentation of WPS itself is good, but the documentation about the SAS language is lacking with the exception of a kind of syntax template.