Sourcing, manipulating working with data in SAS

[Mega_1A_1234]

Hi all 

I have a keen interest in learining SAS for work purposes. May seem like a grossly genertic question, but I wanted to get a feel for how I can use SAS to source, manipulate and work with transaction and other types of customer data?. I would like to analyze my customers transaction records for a type of product I have sold them, and compare usage of that product compared to other customers I have not had any contact with. Be great to understand the versatility of SAS compared to R to start investigating my central question. 

The sourcing will be conducted from an oracle database, but I may need to aggregate data, account for duplicates etc. Any ideas on other potential issues routinely encounted with data of this type?. 

Thanks in advance!. 

[PatrickHall]

Hi,

In reference to the comparison with R: One is not better than the other - though people attempt to compare them all the time - they are simply very different technologies. SAS is a full-stack system of proprietary software products meant to help organizations access, manage, and analyze data and to deploy the results of the analysis into operational, enterprise computer systems. R is a very popular and useful open source langauge, geared primarily toward manipulating and analyzing data and presenting results.

1.) SAS offers numerous data management packages across data integration, data quality, database and Hadoop integration, data governance and more: http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/data-management.html

2.) I am not a data management expert but I think you are asking for straightfoward functionality that would be available in Base SAS (a SAS language-based data manipulation and analysis package) and SAS Access to Oracle.

Base SAS: http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/base-sas.html

(You can try out Base SAS in the free SAS University Edition: http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/university-edition.html)

SAS Access to Oracle: https://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/acreldb/68028/HTML/default/viewer.htm#titlepage.htm

If you are thinking of using SAS on a single laptop or workstation (as opposed to an enterprise install that could entail multiple servers, clients, databases and grids or clusters of machines), the traditional advantages of SAS are:

• Highly optimized data access to and from Oracle
• Ability to execute SQL code in the Oracle database from your SAS session (SAS PROC SQL: http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/sqlproc/69049/PDF/default/sqlproc.pdf) 
• Disk-enabled memory management: SAS holds data on disk until it is needed in-memory, allowing you to work with much larger data sets than RAM alone would allow
• Combining database-like data managment tools with analysis tools in the same client.

I think the main drawback is if you find you need another package, you can't just download it. You, your company, or your University typically has to purchase the additional package.

HTH.

[Mega_1A_1234]

Thanks so much for the great reply!.