NJSUG

Winter Meeting, Friday 08Mar2002, 9am, Rutgers Labor Education Center, New Brunswick NJ

You Could Look It Up: An Introduction to SASHELP Dictionary Views
Michael Davis, Bassett Consulting Services, Inc., CT

Ever wonder what titles were already set in a batch SAS session? Need a list of the members in a library so your macro can automatically hack at each one? Curious as to how many observations are in that data set without running a procedure or DATA step? Want to see what macro variables already exist? Anytime that one has a question about what is going on in their SAS session, they can answer it the same way that SAS itself does the task... they can look it up in the SASHELP dictionary views.

Michael Davis is Vice President of Bassett Consulting Services, Inc., a SAS Alliance Silver Member. An independent consultant since 1994, he previously worked for Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Connecticut and the Connecticut Hospital Association. A SAS user since 1985, Michael specializes in developing custom web-enabled and full-screen decision support systems using SAS/IntrNet, SAS/AF FRAME, and other SAS products, including SAS/Warehouse Administrator. He is a past chairman of the Hartford Area SAS User Group and is a frequent presenter at NESUG and SUGI. Michael is also the past president of the Connecticut Chapter of the Independent Computer Consultants Association.

Spring Meeting, Friday 07Jun2002, 9am, Rutgers Labor Education Center, New Brunswick NJ

Choice of Development Tool for the User Interface of a Client-Server Application in a SAS Environment
Barry R. Cohen

Application developers in SAS environments regularly face the question about what tool to use to build the client-based user interface of their client-server applications. These are environments where (1) the data is in server-based SAS data sets, (2) the primary processing is done with server-based SAS Software applications that cover file management, analysis, and reporting, and (3) the user interface, or front-end, is client-based and is used primarily to direct and control the processing and to present results. Although the server-based back-end is all SAS-based, the front-end user interface can be, but does not have to be, written with SAS Software. The choice of a front-end tool has never been simple because of trade-offs involved. But this tool choice has over time become even less clear because (1) non-SAS front-end tools have eclipsed the primary SAS tool (SAS/AF) in popularity, (2) SAS has stopped growing the SAS/AF tool, and (3) SAS has developed a new tool, AppDev Studio. AppDev Studio is primarily used to build the client and server sides of Web-enabled SAS applications, but it can actually build a front-end to any server-based SAS application and set of data. This paper evaluates SAS/AF, SAS AppDev Studio, and the non-SAS tool class, (with Visual Basic as a prime example), against a series of relevant performance factors. Information is provided to structure and contribute to the decision about which front-end development tool to use.

Barry Cohen is a systems development consultant and President of Planning Data Systems, Inc, with over 20 years experience, much involving SAS Software.

Mr. Cohen has provided services to a variety of industries, including a focus in the pharmaceutical industry. He is a co-founder and President of PhilaSUG, the Philadelphia SAS Users Group. Mr. Cohen is an accomplished author and invited speaker at SAS and other conferences, and occasionally chairs SAS user group conference sections.
His most recent experiences have involved design of a SAS Program Development Environment, performance testing of SAS-based client/server configurations for analytic processing, and efficiency tools for statistical program development in clinical trials.

SAS and ODS / Publishing to a Web Site, IBM / OS390 Implementation
Sanja Batljan

How often users have asked you if you can reproduce a report that they have gotten two months ago? If you do not anticipate this you may find yourself struggling to identify historic data and recreate the report. One approach to get around this problem is to save a hard copy of the all monthly reports in the folder. Another alternative is to save a snap shot of data from 2 months ago in order to rerun the report. It is always easy to forget to do these steps and then you might be in trouble.

Thanks to the Output Deliver System (ODS) we can put any procedure output into an HTML file and publish the file on company's Intranet. Users can then browse those reports whenever they want and for all previous time periods.

This paper will demonstrate how to keep track of historical reports in HTML format and how to navigate those reports. The paper will also cover drill-down links using PROC REPORT on the sample report for each time period. Since the report program is running on OS390 this paper will indicate some specifics of the ODS HTML statement in OS390 operating environment. The WEB server in this case is on UNIX and this paper will demonstrate how to transfer HTML files from OS390 system to UNIX using FTP access method within SAS program on OS390.

Sanja Batljan is Senior Business Analyst in the Database Marketing and Analysis Department of the UBS PaineWebber. She has been SAS user for 6 years. She has been working as SAS Programmer in the financial and health care industry and has experience in the Windows, UNIX, and MVS environments. She is SAS Certified Professional and active participant in NESUG.

Early Autumn meeting - Thursday, 10Oct2002, 9am, Rutgers Inn & Conference Center, New Brunswick

To Web or not to Web
David Ward

The SAS(r) programming community has been bombarded with demos, presentations, user group papers and white papers outlining why we should move our programs to the web. Even with so much emphasis placed on new and exciting ways to access SAS software, most programmers still sit in front of good 'ol Base SAS day in and day out. In this presentation we will explore how you can use SAS with the Internet, whether or not you should actually do this, and why many programmers have avoided it altogether.

David Ward is Technology Director for InterNext, Inc., a software and consulting company located in New Brunswick, New Jersey focusing on SAS-based solutions. Before founding InterNext in 2000, he previously worked in the pharmaceutical industry writing commercial software applications. InterNext has drawn from its consulting and application development experience to build and sell several commercial applications. He is an active speaker at local and regional SAS user groups.

PROC TABULATE: Doin' it in STYLE!
Ray Pass & Sandy McNeill

The advent of the SAS Output Delivery System (ODS to its friends) has turned SAS reports from machine-generated, black & white monospace bores into people-produced, productive and reader-friendly information displays. One of the main principles underlying ODS is the use of Table and Style definitions (also known as Table and Style templates). Most procedures have a standard output layout structure and rely on their Table and Style definitions to govern the cosmetic or stylistic appearance of their tables. Certain procedures (REPORT, TABULATE, etc), however, by the very nature of their complete structural customizability, do not rely on fixed external table definitions. For these procedures, stylistic customizations are performed through the use of the STYLE option, an ODS concept which is integrated into the heart of the procedures' syntax. This presentation will demonstrate the use of STYLES in the TABULATE procedure.

Ray Pass is an independent SAS consultant and has been using the SAS System for too many years. He is the co-author, with Ron Cody, of "Programming SAS by Example" (1995) and has delivered many invited papers at national, regional and local SAS user groups. Ray's primary areas of expertise in the SAS System are report generation and data manipulation. In addition to teaching SAS courses, Ray has also been quite active in organizing and participating in SAS user group activities on various levels. Ray was one of the founders of both the New York Area SAS Users Group (NYASUG) and the NorthEast SAS Users Group (NESUG.) Ray co-chaired the first two NESUG annual conferences ('88, '89) and has been a Section Chair at many SAS User Group International (SUGI) annual conventions.

Late Autumn meeting - Tuesday, 10Dec2002, 9am, SAS offices, Bedminster NJ

ODS Output - A Discussion of Some Examples
Cynthia Stetz

Even if you have never written an ODS statement, if you are using SAS version 7 or above, you are using the SAS Output Delivery System. In prior versions, SAS procedures managed their own output and were limited to producing monospace SAS listings. Some procedures created output datasets, and some did not. Now, the SAS Institute has 'filtered out' this processing from the procedures and created the SAS Output Delivery System.

In this presentation, we will briefly describe ODS, and then discuss several output examples, including HTML, RTF, PDF and high-resolution printer output. We will show how ODS interacts with procedures and the data step, and how you can combine multiple elements, such as text and a graph on one page. Please note: this presentation is based on SAS version 8.2; some ODS features discussed are not production in prior releases.

Cynthia Stetz is a SAS Certified Professional, with over 12 years experience using the SAS System. She specializes in data management and delivery, turning data into information for clients in industries such as finance, education, and insurance. Cynthia has been a speaker at several SUGI, NESUG and NYSUG meetings, and at SAS seminars in South Korea and Japan.

SAS Version 9 Features
Terry Drucker, SAS

SAS Version 9 revolves around four major cornerstones: usability, scalability, interoperability, and manageability. This discussion will focus on new products, features, functions, and solutions within SAS to meet these four cornerstones. A timeline of SAS V9 as well as supported platforms will also be discussed.

Demo session by SAS Systems Engineers including

INTELLIGENT ARCHITECTURE

+ Data Warehousing
+ Business Intelligence
+ Advanced Analytics including Data Mining
+ Foundation Technologies

ENTERPRISE INTELLIGENCE - Strategic Performance