SAS Analyst in SAS 9.3

[kleinhev]

Dear SAS, please re-introduce SAS Analyst to SAS 9.3. SAS/IML is a poor replacement for SAS Analyst since it cannot handle large dataset without throwing "Out of Memory" errors. Can you not make Analyst available as a download for those who really need to get this back? The only option to currently analyze large datasets seems to be hard-coding which is very painfull indeed.

[Doc_Duke]

Enterprise Guide can handle large datasets and does not generally involve hard coding.

Everything is a trade off.  With IML and Insight, you are trading arbitrary file sizes for speed of response and interactivity.  EGuide provides a GUI interface, but the cost of arbitrary file size becomes the lack of dynamic response.  Personally, I find the EGuide interface much more intuitive and easier to teach than Analyst was.

BTW, the Insight user interface looks remarkably like the Analyst one.

BTW2, Analyst called IML to do some of it's work, so you didn't get away from the memory limit; you just got lucky.

Doc Muhlbaier

Duke

[kleinhev]

Duke,

many thanks for your hints!

- Guided data analysis (SAS/LAB) freezes SAS completely (can't get beyond the first window)

- Interactive data analysis (SAS/Insight): Opens my dataset (7.7 m observations) but how do I run a frequency analysis?

- SAS/IML Studio: cannot open the dataset due to memory issues

- SAS Enterprise Guide: works perfectly!

Although I understand SAS's policy of downwards compatibility which is a good one, isn't the current set of statistical tools a bit messy? I also do not like that I have to run SAS Enterprise Guide as a separate application.