January 2024

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Fan of fantasy football? Got SAS skills? These worlds collide in a new SAS Community Library article series that reveals how to use SAS to optimize your lineup. Check out the first of six posts, Fantasy Football Lineup Optimization: Part 1.

Dear Reader:

Welcome to 2024! Continuing Tech Report’s tradition of setting you up for success, this issue equips you to start out strong as a SAS user. You’ll find a fine assortment of blog posts, tutorials, learning events and other goodies.

But first head over to the SAS Support Community and cast your ballot in the SAS Customer Recognition Awards. Voting is open through Friday, Feb. 2. Click “Like” on your favorite entries! Easy peasy. Online voting combined with a judging panel will determine the winners, who will be announced LIVE at SAS Innovate in Las Vegas, April 16-19, 2024. First-place category winners get a trip to SAS Innovate*, a trophy and swag.

*Visit SAS Customer Recognition Awards for the official contest rules.
Hit reply and let me know what you look forward to accomplishing using SAS in the year ahead!

Beverly Brown
Editor, Tech Report

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SAS Innovate 2024
Round up your team and secure your place in Las Vegas for an AI and analytics experience like no other! Happening April 16-19, 2024, at the ARIA Resort and Casino, you’ll hear from Google’s first chief decision scientist Cassie Kozyrkov, tech journalist Kara Swisher and noted organizational psychologist Adam Grant and others.

SAS Bowl XXXVIII – SAS Programming: Getting Started
Beginning your SAS journey? This Valentine’s Day edition of SAS Bowl trivia is for you. It delves into importing and exporting data, SAS syntax and popular SAS procedures. Register now and join us at 10:00 a.m. ET on Wed., Feb. 14.

Tune into the SAS Viya Release Highlights Show
In the latest episode, you’ll learn about new capabilities in SAS Information Governance and SAS for Microsoft Office 365, new data-management features in SAS Viya and much more.

Learn to use Python Code in SAS Studio in less than 15 minutes
This SAS Quick Start tutorial reveals how to easily execute Python code in SAS Studio on SAS Viya to access and prepare data. You’ll also learn how to load data to Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) for further exploration and reporting using SAS Visual Analytics.

Review The DO Loop’s top 10 posts in 2023
Resolve to learn something new in 2024? Rick Wicklin’s blog is a great place to start. Of 90 posts published last year, the most popular ones were about SAS programming, data visualization, statistics and a few addressing general-interest topics.

Explore how AI can write SQL queries and answer your questions
In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), the ability to chat with unstructured text data has been well-established. See what’s possible by extending this capability to interact with structured data.

Explore how Kubernetes identifies, authenticates you
SAS’ Rob Collum was given access to a Kubernetes cluster. The Kubernetes administrator who provided that access wasn't immediately available to answer his questions. That sent Rob down a rabbit hole: What level of access and permissions did he have in the cluster?

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​For developers

The latest version of the SAS Extension for VS Code includes a new way to connect to your SAS 9 remote server (using IOM). Visit the GitHub repository for more details and instructions on how to create a profile for this connection.

Discover the Possibilities: SAS^® Visual Studio Code Extension
Join SAS’ David Weik at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., Feb. 8 as he introduces the official SAS Visual Studio code extension and demonstrates how it can make you more productive coding SAS.

How Do I Use SAS^® Intelligent Decisioning to Its Full Potential?
Join SAS’ Crystal Baker at 11:00 a.m. ET on Tues., Feb. 13 as she reveals innovations of SAS Intelligent Decisioning and the key capabilities including segmentation trees and value lists, custom function and the deployments page.

Diving Deeper: How Many Ways Can You Join SAS^® Tables?
Join SAS’ Charu Shankar at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., Feb. 22 to learn various join algorithms and comparisons between them. Charu will focus on the ways in which joins can be processed via SQL.

Tips and Tricks: Improve Forecast Accuracy Using Interactive Modeling in SAS^® Visual Forecasting
Join SAS’ Beth Ebersole at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tues., Feb. 27 to learn how to improve your forecasting results by adjusting model parameters for individual forecasts in the easy-to-use user interface of SAS Visual Forecasting. You will learn how to use the Interactive Modeling node in SAS Visual Forecasting to tweak individual forecasts to improve accuracy and more.