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February 2025

Started ‎02-28-2025 by
Modified ‎02-28-2025 by
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SAS’ Falko Schulz uses data provided by the OECD Affordable Housing Database and SAS® Visual Analytics to reveal house-price trends and housing affordability across OECD countries

Dear Reader,

What if you could estimate SAS® Viya® productivity gains for your business? Turns out you can. The SAS Viya Value Calculator, a free interactive tool now available, provides you a custom report to support your data and AI decisions. Give it a try!

Speaking of getting the most from your SAS investment, it’s absolutely critical to keep your systems secure. We encourage you to run the latest SAS software and apply hot fixes regularly. As outlined in Support for SAS® 9.4 & Earlier Releases, SAS Technical Support would like to make you aware of important dates for SAS 9.4 customers in the year ahead.

We recognize that some deployments, such as certified or verified systems, are not easy to change in coordination with the SAS release schedule. That’s why we are offering SAS Extended Technical Support for software that has moved to Limited Support. Contact your account executive for more information and to see whether your system qualifies. Learn more in the SAS Support Community.

Now, scroll on down to find other resources that will set you up for success. Tips, learning events and much more! 

Happy reading!

Bev Brown
Editor, Tech Report

Someone forwarded you this edition of Tech Report? Subscribe to receive your own copy each month! Back issues “live” on the SAS Support Community.

Tech tips with Chris

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The SAS programming language has been with us for over 50 years. At the beginning of its life, it grew and changed at a rapid pace. As the years went by, it became more stable, and while new features kept coming, they were like Easter eggs — harder to spot. The blessing (and curse) of SAS is that your program from 20 years ago probably still works today — but there are also likely new features in SAS that could make it even better.

One of these changes — introduced just 7 years ago in 2018 — is the ability to use %if/%then/%else conditional logic within open code. We're still educating users about this today, and it's always met with the same reaction: “whoa, how long has that been in there?!”

Here's an example use:

%if %sysfunc(exist(sashelp.class)) %then %do;

  proc means data=sashelp.class; run;

%end;

Before this feature, if you wanted to SAS code to run based on some condition (the existence of a certain file, the day of the week, the success of an earlier step), you had to create an entire SAS macro routine to encapsulate the SAS code with the logic statements to check that the conditions were true. With the "new" feature, you can now use macro-style %IF-%THEN-%ELSE statements anywhere in your program, without having to package them with a SAS macro routine. It's a game-changer — as long as you know it's there!

Here are a couple of other "new" features of the SAS language that every SAS programmer should know:

Tell me: what's your favorite "Easter egg" in the SAS programming language? Let me know

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Upcoming maintenance outage

Use SAS® OnDemand for Academics? Brief outage on March 11
SAS® OnDemand for Academics all-regions maintenance outage is set for 7:00AM-11:00AM ET on Tues., March 11. Read ODA status page for more information. 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​SAS Viya Release Highlights

Get up to speed on SAS Viya 2024.12 and 2025.01
Tune into the first 2025 episode of SAS Viya Release Highlights Show to learn about the latest features. You’ll also get an expert’s explanation of how to integrate Causal AI into your business decisions and much more. 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Tips & tricks

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Getting started performing a Bayesian analysis with missing data in SAS
SAS/STAT offers a principled treatment of missing data in a frequentist paradigm. SAS’ Michael Senter reveals how with a few code tweaks, you can seamlessly transition to a Bayesian analysis.

A SAS tip: Use the hyphen and colon operators to specify multiple data sets on the SET statement
Most of you know about the hyphen operator and the colon operator for specifying a list of variable names that start with the same prefix. SAS’ Rick Wicklin shows how you can use the same syntax on the SET statement in the DATA step to specify a list of data sets whose names start with the same prefix.

From email overload to efficiency: A transformer-based LLM solution for SAS Tech Support
SAS' Ann Kuo walks you through how SAS Tech Support developed an email classifier to clean up spam and misaddressed emails using SAS Viya's NLP-based text classifier.

Using FILENAME URL to access internet information
Would you like to use web pages or API responses as input in your SAS programs? SAS’ Mark Jordan shows how to issue a GET request to an API on the internet and use the response directly in your SAS code. The post includes a link to download the code and data so you can experiment with it yourself.

Automate SAS Studio Flows Documentation with Azure OpenAI in a Custom Step
SAS’ Bogdan Teleuca reveals how leveraging Azure OpenAI and a SAS Studio custom step, you can generate clear, detailed and governance-focused flows documentation in seconds.

Email Configuration in CI360 Part 1. Email Opt-Outs
SAS’ Adam Pollacchi details recent changes to email configuration in SAS Customer Intelligence 360. This post, the first of two, addresses amendments to the email opt-out options.

Keep track of who accessed SAS data sets in a compute server
Is it possible to track who has accessed which SAS data sets and when? When SAS’ Bruno Mueller gets this question, he usually shares this article: Auditing data access: who did what and when? This post expands on that article and explains how to use this in SAS Viya with additional features such as custom message layout and filtering (no log entries for libref WORK or SASHELP).

How to Solve the LinkedIn Queens Puzzle with PROC OPTMODEL
Love solving logic puzzles? This SAS Community Library article formulates the LinkedIn Queens Puzzle as an integer programming model and solves it using PROC OPTMODEL in SAS Optimization.

Gain an understanding of correlation matrices in repeated measures models
In December, SAS’ Danny Modlin published a post about Mixed Model analysis. In it he mentioned the topic of correlation and covariance matrices and promised a separate post on that. This is that. In longitudinal analysis or repeated measurement structures, you’ll focus on controlling for dependence among observations using correlation or covariance matrices. He reveals the importance of these matrices and gives examples of how they are typically used in analyses.

Use SAS® Enterprise Miner? Learn about building models in Model Studio
SAS Enterprise Miner and Model Studio are both predictive modeling workhorses. Each can also be used to perform other types of analysis aside from just building supervised models. SAS Enterprise Miner is more flexible when it comes to building models. Model Studio actually helps the analyst build a workflow by removing mundane tasks from the analyst such as where to place nodes or how to connect them. Your transition from SAS Enterprise Miner into the modern and exciting world of Model Studio will be easier if you understand the similarities and differences between how you physically build models in each.

Learn about SAS® Intelligent Decisioning: Segmentation Tree Graphical Diagram
In SAS Intelligent Decisioning (as of 2024.11), you can now view segmentation trees as a graphical diagram. An earlier post introduces the concept of using segmentation trees in a decision. This one shows you enhancements that have been made to segmentation trees that enable you to visualize them graphically. 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Use case

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From data to drive-thru: Revolutionizing fast food with AI and analytics
Boddie-Noell Enterprises, the largest Hardee’s franchise operator in the US, relies on data-driven decisions powered by SAS® Viya® to serve customers delicious food in record time. 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​For developers

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Custom Step Development: Make Your Environment Work For You
SAS Studio Custom Steps provide a low-code user interface to SAS programs, promoting code reusability and accelerating analytics development. The SAS Studio Custom Steps are stored in a GitHub repository, which continues to grow. Contributions are welcome. 

SAS Bowl XLIX: SAS Innovate 2025
It has gone by other names in the past—SUGI, SAS Global Forum, SAS Explore—but this year our largest annual conference will continue to be known as SAS Innovate. This edition of SAS Bowl Trivia prepares you for the event while also looking back on its predecessors. 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Upcoming learning events

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(Each is one hour and complimentary.)

How To Make Your LLM Work For You
Join SAS’ Sundaresh Sankaran and Sherrine Eid at 11:00 a.m. on Thurs., March 6 to explore core techniques for effectively building with large language models (LLMs). You will get:

  • An overview of LLMs and GenAI development.
  • Encouragement to develop LLM-based solutions.
  • LLM and GenAI use cases in the life sciences domain.

From Data to Insights: Leveraging SAS Visual Investigator scenarios for anomaly Detection
Join SAS’ Allison Lin at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., March 13 to learn how to use SAS Visual Investigator to identify suspicious anomalies in data. You will learn:

  • About SAS Visual Investigator and its core concepts.
  • How to create row-level scenarios to survey data by transaction.
  • How to create aggregation scenarios to survey data at an aggregate level.

The smart path forward: Modernizing from SAS®9 to SAS® Viya®
Join industry leaders at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tues., March 18 to explore how transitioning from SAS®9 to Viya® can transform your analytics capabilities. Learn about the strategic benefits, practical insights from real customers, and responses to common migration concerns.

How do I clean my data using SAS Programming? Part 3
Join SAS’ Jacqueline Johnson at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., March 20 to learn more tips and tricks for cleaning data using SAS programming. You will learn how to:

  • Extract and count substrings.
  • Search for strings.
  • Concatenate strings.
  • Remove characters from strings.

Cracking the JSON code: From chaos to clarity
Join Jerry Alex of Teva Pharmaceuticals at 11:00 a.m. ET on Tues., March 25 to learn how to automate the conversion of JSON files to streamline projects. You will learn how to:

  • Seamlessly automate the JSON conversion.
  • Enhance data integrity and regulatory compliance.
  • Provide scalable innovation for broader business impact. 
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‎02-28-2025 04:14 PM
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