Review of a SAS Enterprise Guide training course

Juan Wu, Pinnacle Solutions
juan.wu@psiconsultants.com

About the author
Juan Wu is a statistician with Pinnacle Solutions in Indianapolis, Indiana. Juan received her M.S. in Statistics at Mississippi State University. Juan has also received her certification in SAS Programming.

Advanced Querying Using SAS Enterprise Guide

Advanced Querying Using SAS Enterprise Guide is a new live web course offered by SAS Training. This course focuses on using the Query Builder within SAS Enterprise Guide, including using SAS functions that manipulate character, numeric, and date values; convert variable types; and build conditional expressions using the Expression Builder.

There are two sessions with each session of three and a half hours spanned over 2 days. The first session covers the following modules: Using Functions, Manipulating Numeric Vales and Manipulating SAS Date Values. The second session includes four modules: Converting Data Type, Manipulating Character Values, Creating Values Conditionally, and Summarizing Data in a Query.

Throughout the course sessions, clear examples in simple queries and more complex ones involving subset, joins, and grouping and filtering are provided by the instructor. There are also in class practices and after class exercises provided along with step-by-step solutions. The audio connection feature provides direct interaction between the instructor and the students. Unlike other e-Learning courses from SAS that aren't "live," students can ask questions and receive solutions during the class real-time.

There are also complete course notes along with practice problems and their solutions to download. It will be a great resource for reviewing and future reference.

Overall, it was a pleasant experience taking the course. It is a good choice for anyone with little SAS, SAS Enterprise Guide or Query Builder experience who wants to create advanced queries for data manipulating (note the course description indicates that no SAS or SQL programming experience is required; however, Querying and Reporting Using SAS Enterprise Guide or Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide are listed as pre-requisites).

New SAS BI blog

Tips Consolidated
Time is of the essence when attempting to solely support all of the SAS BI products to a 1500+ employee company but trying to get information on how these products work in the real world took too much of it. SAS provides great training on Stored Processes, OLAP, and Web Report Studio and there are several areas on the SAS Support Website that cover the basics of using several of these products. However, where can you find information on what the character limit is for OLAP values if the training class is still weeks away? How do you get a Stored Process to work with optional user driven parameters? Now there is a new blog to assist in your SAS BI efforts.

But wait, what is a BLOG you say?
Let me digress for a moment and define Blogs for you. “A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. The term "blog" came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term "server log" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog, 8/31/05). Blogs are typically operated by a single individual, meaning that new content is at the sole discretion of the owner, however many allow viewers to write their own comments to the posts. In fact, there are several SAS Blogs out there. Just search Google for 'SAS Blog'or 'SAS BI Blog'. But the following is new and will continue to provide you with another viewpoint of SAS BI products.

SAS BI-ogsource
http://sas-bi.blogspot.com
Created this August, the new "SAS BI-ogsource" offers a central location for SAS Users (Administrators, Analysts, or Business Users) to find tips, lessons learned, problems and successes from using these wonderful SAS products. The information is gathered via research, experimentation and contacts with other SAS BI experts. Web OLAP Viewer and OLAP Cube Studio are highlighted in several recent posts, as well as Stored Processes and Add-In to Microsoft Office. Expect to find other tidbits on Web Report Studio and Information Delivery Portal in the near term.

A few examples of recent posts:

1. Training
Consider during your training sessions with new users a comparison of the various SAS BI products with TV stations or services. When I used this analogy is was MUCH easier to convey how each could be used to achieve business intelligence depending on the user and business scenario.

2. Refreshing OLAP Data
Another tip posted recently is concerning the saved proc olap code from OLAP Cube Studio. Don’t use it, at least in it’s entirety. Refresh the OLAP cube by using the ‘delete_physical’ option and then running the short version of Proc OLAP.

3. Stored Process Parameter Handling
Passing optional multiple-selection variables through Stored Processes requires a three-step test. First, you must determine if any value was selected, the example suggests

%length(&variable_name) > 0.

Then you must test to see if more than 1 value was selected for that variable.

%SYMGLOBL (variable_name0) = 0

is recommended for this step. Finally, if both test fail above, you must determine how many variables were selected and run a do-loop.

Feedback Welcome
This Blog is setup to allow users to add their own comments to the posts. The more submissions, the more valuable this resource becomes. Also, any ideas for new tips can be submitted directly to bi-weblog@earthlink.net.