SAS General FAQ’s

SAS is self-documenting.How?
During the compilation phase SAS stores information about itself.It contains information about the datasets such as its name,the date it has been created ,name of the variable and their types and lengths etc.This is also called the descriptor portion of the dataset.Hence SAS is considered as self documenting.

How do you make use of functions?
SAS Functions are certain in-built routines that enable us to compute many types of data manipulations quickly and easily. E.g. Data Cleaning(Parsing)

SAS Blogs

We continued our search for more interesting sites, blogs, forums and hit upon couple of SAS blogs :
1. SAS Official blog
2. SAS Certification blog
3. SAS weblog

The SAS official blog has less focussed technical material and is in general relevant for people who are already working in SAS just to pick their current awareness.
Link :http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/

SAS weblog seems to be retired now. Some technical info but gets a bit abstract at some places, and no new entries beyond 2006 – consider closed.
Link : http://sas.weblogsinc.com/

The SAS certification blog is definetely technical oriented and is suitable for folks going for the SAS base certification. The blog has no new entries beyond 2006, may be you expect no new information on that blog in future.
Link : http://sascert.blogspot.com/

For your convinience we have the posts from the two blogs as a section on the right on the main page. Please send us more SAS blog sites that you have found online so that we can build the list up.

Our take : We need a comprehensive blog that focuses on technical aspects related to SAS, not just links to other sites with code or unending promotion of SAS global forum.

SAS Enterprise Guide

We have been unfortunate to have faced around 300 SAS programmers in an interview program last year. When we tested them on the technical side we noticed that most of them were good in SAS basics but were not great programmers. The main problem was errors, and none of them bothered to document or comment their code. The net result was a complicated decision we faced to select them for the positions. I would recommend SAS programmers to consider SAS Enterprise guide as a possible option to reduce their “deficiencies” in error management and code documentation.

Enterprise Guide is the graphical user interface to SAS that allows programs to perform very complicated tasks in a fraction of time. It has powerful OLAP capabilities making your Business Intelligence and data exploration tasks very intuitive and efficient.

If you want to learn more about Enterprise Guide : http://www.sas.com/technologies/bi/query_reporting/guide/, Enterprise Guide is now part of Clinnovo’s course curriculum so if you want to get trained on Enterprise Guide contact us.

Why SAS ?

Recently we were looking for some SAS experts to work for clients in US, UK and Singapore, the response as always was huge (200+ resumes), for some of those that looked outstanding we had a telephone interview with only one question : Why SAS ?, unfortunately only 2 candidates knew why SAS was relevant in clincial research.

If you know why SAS please feel free to let us know using the comments option below