How about this? data want; keep word; concat_location = "Los Lunas/Corona/Corona/White Mountain/White Mountain"; do i = 1 to countw(concat_location,"/"); word = scan(concat_location, i, "/"); output; end; run; proc sort data = want nodupkey; by word; run; data want; keep concat_location_dedup; set want end = eof; retain concat_location_dedup; length concat_location_dedup $ 1024; concat_location_dedup = catx("/", concat_location_dedup, word); if eof; run; ... View more

An alternative to manipulating SAS user metadata programmatically is to sync it from your security system (for example Active Directory). SAS provides the programs to do this and you can read about it in this link.  We use this ourselves and it does avoid a lot of extra user metadata maintenance. ... View more

With SAS 9.4 I've always just used OS capabilities to view SAS log files. It sounds like this is not so convenient with Viya. ... View more

@vfarmak - Thanks for the clarification on your setup. Indeed you should be able to do all configuration just on your laptop. I don't use DI Studio so there isn't really any further help I can offer. You could also try the Git functions available in the SAS language but I suspect those are more for versioning SAS code and not DIS jobs. ... View more

Where is your SAS 9.4M8 installed? On a remote SAS server or on your PC? If it is on a remote SAS server then that server would need to be able to access your Git URL Check this with your SAS administrator.   ... View more

This is a feature of Windows and Excel. Any attempt to read an Excel file in SAS under Windows will fail if it is already opened in Excel. FCOPY, PROC IMPORT, the EXCEL or XLSX LIBNAME engines will all fail.  ... View more

How many EG users do you support? I would recommend that SCCM-type solutions, as @Nigel_Pain suggests, are only worthwhile for large user numbers. Please note that for each upgrade you would need to request a new SAS Software Depot, download it, then do the SCCM packaging.   In my experience, for small user numbers (say < 50) the "Check for Updates" facility is far preferable as it requres less work. If company policy prevents users doing this themselves, then can your help desk do the upgrade for these users applying their admin rights? Also it is perfectly OK to have users with varying versions as long as they are at least all on EG 8. It really isn't necessary for all users to be upgraded each time there is a minor upgrade.   ... View more

We provide a lot of SAS datasets to Power BI by loading them into SQL Server tables using SAS/ACCESS database connectors and that works very efficiently. While we use SAS 9.4, I'm sure this approach would work equally as well in Viya.   ... View more

Here's one way of doing this - using RETAIN requires use of a variable not being read in: data Reviews; input @1 key $3. @6 Review_Date mmddyy10.; format Review_Date date9.; datalines; 380 3/31/2023 380 9/6/2023 380 3/6/2024 380 9/18/2024 380 4/4/2025 381 2/22/2024 381 6/30/2024 381 7/1/2025 ; run; data Reviews_Want; keep key Review_Date Days; set Reviews; by key; if first.key then Days = 0; else Days = Review_Date - Last_Review_Date; output; retain Last_Review_Date; Last_Review_Date = Review_Date; run;   ... View more

What you are doing on your PC suggests to me that your multiple SAS sessions are IO bound with the PROC CONTENTS processes waiting until your permanent storage IO channels free up. I suspect your primary SAS session is first in the IO queue so is not delayed as much. Try reducing your number of remote sessions - does that reduce the lag? Also I hope you are using the WAIT = NO option on your RSUBMITs otherwise they wont run in parallel. ... View more

@PhilGUK - Yes, I have worked in the UK too but for SAS out at Marlow, many years ago. Definitely a career highlight!   Regarding our use cases for SAS/CONNECT, they are typically resource intensive especially high CPU, so the session start up time becomes immaterial. Parallelising one of our jobs reduced run time from 5 or 6 hours down to 2.5 hours so more than halved. This is purely SAS 9.4, Viya not being an option for us as yet. ... View more

It is entirely up to you what your definition of churn is and how many months of inactivity you want to base your churn indicator on. I don't have your data so I can't really provide any guidance on this. What you are suggesting makes sense. ... View more

I suspect the question is: how many months of inactivity results in permanent inactivity for the majority of customers? You want the training data to accurately reflect churn reality, that is permanent inactivity. You will need to do some analytics on your data to find out what is the inactivity period spread for most churners. ... View more