Hi People,
I am interested in learning sas administration. I want to know if I need to know some basic or advanced level of sas programming to learn sas administration. If sas programming knowledge is necessary for a sas administrator, to what level I need to learn programming?
And what is the programming role in sas administration?
I do not have any programming background.
Hello @muni2chandra84,
whilst SAS programming skills are not a must on many SAS Administration roles, it is actually very recommended if you want to provide a minimum good quality (and to be able to understand SAS!).
I would say, that you don;t need the skills to be able to write any SAS code from scratch, but you should be able at least to read SAS code, understand the basics, and even to write simple data steps to test your SAS platform. Then, if you wans to provide better support to your SAS users, and get excellence on your career as SAS platform administrator, it is definetely a good idea if you dive into some concepts as performance differences between PROC SQL and data steps, and such (seen SAS Base Programming III: on https://support.sas.com/edu/schedules.html?id=1917&ctry=US&locationId=ol )
It really depends on the role you have undertaken, your skills and what you are wanting (and needing) to achieve. @PaulHomes wrote a blog on IT skills or SAS skills - what's more important? which may help you with your question. There is also a good blog post on SAS administrator roles and responsibilities that you may find useful to gain a better understanding of the SAS administrator role.
Kind Regards,
Michelle
I'd say, the more, the better. As the SAS admin you usually develop into the prime 2nd/3rd-level support person, so you need to be able to make sense of people's codes when a problem arises.
You will work with customizations that are written into the autoexec and into the sasautos.
You will have to set up certain administrative maintenance jobs. Synchronisation of users into SAS metadata comes to mind, that requires Base SAS programming and macro programming.
So start out with the basic programming, SQL and macro.
And never stop learning. (When you're through learning, you're through)
Hello @muni2chandra84,
whilst SAS programming skills are not a must on many SAS Administration roles, it is actually very recommended if you want to provide a minimum good quality (and to be able to understand SAS!).
I would say, that you don;t need the skills to be able to write any SAS code from scratch, but you should be able at least to read SAS code, understand the basics, and even to write simple data steps to test your SAS platform. Then, if you wans to provide better support to your SAS users, and get excellence on your career as SAS platform administrator, it is definetely a good idea if you dive into some concepts as performance differences between PROC SQL and data steps, and such (seen SAS Base Programming III: on https://support.sas.com/edu/schedules.html?id=1917&ctry=US&locationId=ol )
I agree with Juan, being able to understand SAS language(s) - preferably at some advanced level - is a pre-requisite. Sometimes, the administrator is supposed to provide scripts based on SAS APIs (metadata interface, for instance) which require some good coding skills with SAS. Furthermore, some working knowledge of system scripting tools like Shell DOS, MS Powershell or Bash is also strongly recommended.
Thanks so much for your suggestions. I will start learning SAS Programming as well.
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