Why SAS ?

[Kayalvizhi]

HI,

Can you please tell me the management level reasons for using SAS in Data management and for ETL purpose.

And also in comparision with other ETL tools.

Thanks,

Kayalvizhi

[RW9]

Thats dependant on the other surrounding circumstances, its not just a a case of "Why SAS", its specific to your scenario.  What you need is a system analysis to see if SAS can intergrate to your workflows, add thinigs to process etc.  For example what are yours and your teams skillsets, what software fo you currently use, what IT support do you currently have etc. 

[LinusH]

1. Define and document your requirements
2. Prioritise your requirements
3. Create test cases based on your requirements
4. Conduct a comparison based on those test cases
Remember: fast, cheap, quality - you might pick two, never three.

[TomKari]

I agree with what the other responders have said. And, it's really the job of SAS marketing to explain the competitive advantages of SAS. Most of the experts on this community don't work for SAS, they are users of the software.

That being said, here are a few of the reasons I find SAS an excellent tool for ETL and data managament:

The SAS software tools have been oriented towards data management from the start. There are many computing problems I wouldn't use SAS to solve, but if my problem is in the area of data management and ETL, I feel confident that SAS will be one of the best, if not the best (my definition is the cost to solve a particular problem.)

SAS is quite mature, which means they've been improving the product since the 1970s. That has led to a very functionally rich product.

Because SAS was developed before SQL was universal, SAS added support (very good support) for SQL after the fact. Because of this, SAS has many tools for manipulating data, not just limited to SQL. There are many ETL / data management problems that SQL isn't optimal for.

SAS interfaces very well with other data management (database, proprietary data format, .csv) products, and it is also well-designed to produce output in a large number of popular formats (HTML, PDF, RTF, XLSX).

I have found that SAS as a company tends to make many good decisions, to move the software product in the needed directions. I feel confident that the software won't fall behind in the marketplace.

My 2 cents worth,
   Tom

[RonAgresta]

Hi Kayalvizhi,

I wanted to give the community a chance to respond (thanks to those that did!) before providing a SAS perspective to the “why SAS?” question.

• SAS is one of just a few software vendors that delivers a complete set of capabilities in the data management domain. SAS offerings provide technology for data access, data transformation, data integration, data quality, data governance, data federation, and master data management among other things.
• SAS provides different user interfaces depending on your preference or use cases. You can write code, use general purpose data management tools, or access unique data management functionality in any number of SAS applications. Many users combine all three in their projects.
• Industry analysts (I know...grain of salt occasionally required) rate us highly among competitors across these areas.
• Combine SAS data management with advanced analytics from SAS and you have a potent combination that is difficult for other vendors to match.

I’m afraid without additional details about your requirements, it's difficult to be more specific. I think you will find that SAS data management technologies stack up well against other data integration software vendors.

Ron