The SAS Community Nordic Advent Calendar 2025 has officially come to an end. 🎄 We hope you enjoyed the festive tips and tricks for making your analytics sparkle! All of this year’s Juletips are available here : Tag: "Juletip2025" in "SAS Community Nordic" - SAS Support Communities   ✨ A big thank you to all contributors and followers for keeping this tradition alive. See you next year for even more insights and creativity! ✨   ... View more

How a Christmas Cake Explains Data Sharing   Imagine you’ve baked a delicious Christmas cake at home. When you head to the holiday table, you want to enjoy it—and maybe share it with others. First, you need to bring the cake to the right house, where the celebration happens. Inside the house, there are two places for treats: The kitchen counter, where the cake waits patiently. The holiday table, where everyone can enjoy it right away. You can keep the cake on your own plate, just for you, or place it in the center of the table so others can taste it too. If you want to share, you’ll need to prepare it—slice it and remove the wrapping. And if the table ever flips and everything disappears, it’s good to have another cake waiting in the kitchen so you can bring it back. If your recipe is a secret, you can put the cake straight on your plate without anyone seeing it. But if the table flips, you’ll need to fetch it from home again. In short: Sometimes the treats are just for you, sometimes for everyone. And when you prepare them well, sharing becomes easy.     Now, you might wonder: how does this tie into getting data into SAS Viya? For a while, I’ve been thinking about the simplest way to explain the main steps and differences when getting data into SAS Viya. So, here’s a festive analogy you can share when your relatives ask about it during Christmas dinner!   Your Data = Food, The Christmas Cake Imagine the data on your computer—an Excel file, a CSV, or something similar—as a cake you’ve baked at home. You want to enjoy that cake at Christmas dinner and maybe share it with others. First, you need to bring the cake to the right place: the house where you’ll spend Christmas, the house of SAS Viya.   Two Key Spots in the House Inside the house, there are two main places for food (data): Dining Table = Memory Food on the dining table is ready to eat—fast and easy access (data loaded into CAS memory). Kitchen Countertop = Libraries Food on the countertop is still available. You can easily bring food from the kitchen to the dining table, where eating is quick and convenient. You can also “taste” food directly from the kitchen (query data from libraries without loading into memory), but it’s slower than eating from the table. Personal vs Shared Spaces In the kitchen, you have personal libraries—your own space for food. If you want to share, you prepare the cake (unwrap it and slice it) and move it to shared libraries on the countertop. On the dining table, you have: Your plate = Personal CAS session Middle of the table = Global CAS sessions You can have multiple plates (sessions) at once—each dish has its own plate. For example: SAS Studio plate SAS Visual Analytics plate You can’t move food directly from one plate to another. To share, you need to promote the food from your plate to the middle of the table (global scope in CAS).   Promoting and Sharing Promoting means making your data available beyond your plate: When you promote, the table moves from session scope (private) to global scope in a CAS library. Whether others can access it depends on permissions on that CASLIB and the table: Promote to CASUSER → global table exists but effectively private to you. Promote to a shared CASLIB with proper permissions → global table visible to others. Once promoted, you can still replace the food—but you need to drop and reload the table to update it.   Automation and Recovery You can automate moving food from the kitchen to the table. If the table flips (CAS restarts), the food is lost. Automation makes it easy to refill the table from the kitchen—provided your CASLIBs are configured with source paths and auto-load settings.   Secret Recipes If your cake recipe is top secret, you might skip the kitchen and put the cake straight from your home onto your plate. You can promote it to the middle of the table but keep it private by using permissions. If the table flips, you’ll need to bring it again from home—no automation here.   In Short Kitchen = Libraries (personal/shared) Dining Table = CAS Memory (session scope vs global scope) Promote = Move data from your plate to global CAS space Permissions = Decide if promoted data is private or shared Automation = Easy recovery from libraries if configured So next time someone asks how to get data into SAS Viya, just tell them: “It’s like bringing your Christmas cake to dinner—prepare it, place it, and share it!” ... View more

For this Juletip, let's unwrap a gift that you might have never found or perhaps forgot that you had: the SAS Macro Variable Viewer in SAS Enterprise Guide.   Ever wonder what’s happening behind the scenes with your macro variables? When your SAS programs rely on  %LET  statements,  %SYSFUNC  calls, or conditional logic, keeping track of macro values can feel like detective work. Fortunately, SAS Enterprise Guide has a built-in Macro Variable Viewer that makes this easy—and even fun.   SAS Macro Variable Viewer in EG Why Use the Macro Variable Viewer? The Macro Variable Viewer is your one-stop shop for inspecting and debugging macro variables without cluttering your log with  %PUT  statements. Here’s what it can do: List all macro variables currently defined in your session. Show values instantly—no extra code required. Search by name to find what you need fast. Evaluate macro expressions using the built-in Macro Expression Quick View. Refresh as your program runs.   How to Access It In SAS Enterprise Guide, go to Tools → SAS Macro Variable Viewer. The viewer opens in a separate window, displaying all macro variables in your session. You can keep this window open while you continue to edit and run your SAS programs!   Quick Tips for Using It Search for a Macro Variable Type part of the name in the search box—like  _CLIENTAPP  or  MYVAR —and the list filters instantly. Check Values Without Code Click any macro variable to see its value. No need for  %PUT  statements. Evaluate Expressions Use the Macro Expression Quick View field and test macro functions and values on the fly: %eval(5+3) Or here's a more complext example, showing the date 3 weeks from today: %sysfunc(intnx(week,"&sysdate9"d,3),date9.); Wrap-Up Use the Macro Variable Viewer to help debug your programs and check macro output. It saves time and helps you avoid surprises when your macro-driven logic depends on dynamic values.   Next time you’re troubleshooting a macro-heavy program, skip the guesswork. Open the Macro Variable Viewer and take control of your macro environment—fast, easy, and interactive. ... View more

Every Christmas, Santa faces a monumental challenge: deciding who’s been naughty or nice among 2.2 billion children worldwide. That’s not just a list - it’s a  whole data problem of epic proportions. Without the right decision engine, this task would be nearly impossible. So what is Santa's secret to delivering real time data-driven decisions? This is where Intelligent Decisioning comes in handy! By utilizing the power of data-driven decisions in real time, it makes this huge task a whole lot easier. For Santa and his helpers, that means: Setting Clear Rules: Start with business rules like “If chores completed ≥ 80%, mark as nice.” These rules ensure fairness and consistency. Add Predictive Analytics: Use historical data (past behavior, gift satisfaction) to predict future actions. A machine learning model could score the likelihood of a child staying nice. Real-Time Updates: When Santa gets new data - like a last-minute tantrum - Intelligent Decisioning updates the score instantly, recommends the best action, and even updates his live Santa Tracker app with an optimized delivery route thanks to SCR! Personalized Actions: Instead of a simple naughty/nice label, Santa can tailor gifts based on predicted happiness and effort, making Christmas magical and fair. Bottom line: Intelligent Decisioning helps Santa make smarter, faster, and fairer choices - and it can do the same for businesses managing customer interactions, risk, or operations. Merry Christmas 🎅! ... View more

The December 2025 release of SAS Viya 4 (2025.12) is more than just an update—it’s a gift for every analytics enthusiast. Wrapped in innovation and tied with a ribbon of AI, this release introduces SAS Viya Copilot, your new generative AI assistant designed to make working with data, models, and code as joyful as the holiday season.   What’s Inside the Package?   For SAS Code Lovers: Copilot in Visual Studio Code This holiday season, SAS users finally get their own coding elf! With SAS Viya Copilot for SAS Code Gen, you can: Generate SAS code quickly and accurately. To generate SAS code: Open a SAS program file, or create a new file using SAS language mode. Position the cursor in a SAS comment statement or select a comment block. SAS comments start with /* and end with */. Click Generate code.  Explain complex scripts so even legacy code feels like a classic carol. To generate an explanation of a block of SAS code: Open a SAS program file, or create a new file using SAS language mode. Select a block of SAS code and click Explain. The explanation of the code block is displayed in the SAS Viya Copilot conversation pane on the left side of the application window. Add comments for better collaboration and readability. To add comments to an existing block of SAS code: Open a SAS program file, or create a new file using SAS language mode. Select a block of SAS code and click Add comments. The selected code block is replaced with a block of commented code. From novice coders to seasoned experts, Copilot makes SAS coding as delightful as decorating a tree—organized, colorful, and stress-free.   Viya Copilot for Model Studio Think of it as Santa’s helper for your analytics projects. Whether you’re building machine learning pipelines, interpreting model results, or exploring text analytics and forecasting, Copilot is there to guide you. It explains outputs, suggests next steps, and even answers your toughest documentation questions—making your analytics journey smoother than a sleigh ride. You can access it in Model Studio through a chat window in an expandable side pane.   AI-Powered Model Pipeline Development — Copilot helps you build and improve model pipelines effortlessly: Explain outputs at every stage for clarity and confidence. Suggest and add nodes to keep your pipeline shining bright. Accelerate development by answering questions and simplifying documentation.   The release also includes documentation help Copilot for Model Manager and Intelligent decisioning, which makes understanding various features much easier and quicker.    Why This Matters Just like the holidays bring people together, SAS Viya Copilot connects you with your data in a more intuitive, efficient, and accessible way. It’s not just a feature—it’s a leap toward the future of analytics. There are plenty of new features coming to Copilot next year, so this gift will just keep on giving.   ... View more