Base SAS^® Software

Features

Powerful data analysis capabilities

• Analysis capabilities ranging from simple descriptive statistics to advanced data correlations.
• Library of prewritten programming procedures for managing, analyzing and presenting data.

Flexible 4GL

• Intuitive 4GL with easy-to-learn syntax.
• SAS Macro Facility reduces coding for common tasks and lets you modularize work for easy reuse and maintenance.
• Runs interactively or in batch mode.

Support for wide range of data formats

• Ability to read data in any format, from any kind of file, including variable-length records, binary files, free-formatted data and even files with messy or missing data.
• Support for Structured Query Language (SQL).
• Globalization with full support for the most widely used character encodings (such as Latin1, Latin2, and multiple-byte character sets for Hebrew, Arabic and Asian languages).
• Unicode support so that SAS works with data in multiple languages on all platforms.

Support for Hadoop

• Support for Pig, MapReduce and HDFS commands from the SAS execution environment.
• Supports external file references from within any SAS component. Delimiters are externalized, making it easy to work with Hadoop files.

Performance and scalability

• Parallel I/O optimization lets you work with huge data volumes in a timely manner. Data can be partitioned across devices for faster access, but referenced as a single data set.
• Parallel index creation reduces time needed to create large data sets with multiple indexes or to append data to existing data sets.
• Key SAS procedures are multithreaded for faster execution of standard tasks such as sorting and data summarization.
• Base SAS scalability can be enhanced to span multiple machines and networks using SAS/CONNECT® software, which is available separately.
• Several Base SAS procedures support SQL push-down optimization to Aster Data, EMC Greenplum, IBM DB2, Netezza, Oracle and Teradata.
• SAS format catalogs can be published and compiled inside databases (Aster Data, EMC Greenplum, IBM DB2, Netezza, Oracle and Teradata) so that formats can be applied to the actual data values during query execution.

Interoperability and multiple platform deployment

• MultiVendor Architecture™ allows programs to be written once and run anywhere, regardless of hardware or operating system.
• SAS Open Metadata Architecture enables different applications to exchange metadata.
• Cross-environment data access provides easy-to-access files across a network.
• New GROOVY procedure in SAS 9.3 enables SAS code to execute Groovy code on the Java Virtual Machine.

Manageability

• SAS Management Console provides an extensible Java GUI for administering SAS tasks.
• XML engine imports and exports a wide variety of XML documents.
• A drag-and-drop interface creates XML maps.
• Checkpoint and restart capability allows users to resubmit a failed program in restart mode to complete execution, resuming with the step that did not complete when the failure occurred.
• Application Response Measurement (ARM) interface monitors the availability and performance of transactions within and across diverse applications.

Data presentation

• ODS provides an almost limitless number of choices for reporting and displaying analytical results.
• High-quality graphics are included with Base SAS 9.3:
  • ODS Statistical Graphics.
  • The SG Family of Procedures.
  • The Graphical Template Language.
  • The ODS Graphics Designer.
  • The ODS Graphics Editor.
• Create reports in standard formats such as RTF and PDF. All formats are available on all platforms.
• Create visually appealing graphics from analytic output by default (no additional programming).
• HTML 4 and XML are among the markup languages provided. Modify any markup language that SAS provides or create your own markup language for output. HTML is now the default destination for output.
• Customize or modify output hierarchy; replay output to different destinations without rerunning the program.