What is SAS & what it can do?
SAS is an application or software which initially stood for Statistical Analysis Systems. After a few years of its usage SAS products became diverse so SAS officially dropped the name Statistical Analysis.
SAS was initially made such that it provided wide set tools used to analyze and uncover information. In other way we can say, SAS is a statistical and information system that performs sophisticated data management and statistical analysis. Now-a-days SAS is used in graphics, online data entry, visualizing data, administering data warehouses, building interfaces to the World Wide Web and many more places. The tools of SAS keep on growing.
SAS enables the programmer to perform:
· data entry, retrieval, management, and mining
· report writing and graphics
· statistical analysis
· business planning, forecasting, and decision support
· operations research and project management
· quality improvement
· applications development
· data warehousing (extract, transform, load)
· platform independent and remote computing
SAS is available in multiple computing environments like windows, UNIX and Mainframe
Industries that uses SAS:
SAS has users almost every type of companies, business and financial management, education, government as well as health industries for different type data analysis purpose.
Components:
SAS consists of a number of components, which organizations separately license and install as required.
Base SAS
The core of SAS is the so-called Base SAS Software, which is used to manage data. SAS procedures software analyzes and reports the data. The SQL procedure allows SQL programming in lieu of data step and procedure programming. Library Engines allow transparent access to common data structures such as Oracle, as well as pass-through of SQL to be executed by such data structures. The Macro facility is a tool for extending and customizing SAS software programs and reducing overall program verbosity. The DATA step debugger is a programming tool that helps find logic problems in DATA step programs. The Output Delivery System (ODS) is an extendable system that delivers output in a variety of formats, such as SAS data sets, listing files, RTF, PDF, XML, or HTML. The SAS windowing environment is an interactive, graphical user interface used to run and test SAS programs.
Data Integration Studio
Provides extract, transform, load services
BI Dashboard
A plugin for Information Delivery Portal. It allows the user to create various graphics that represent a broad range of data. This allows a quick glance to provide a lot of information, without having to look at all the underlying data.
Enterprise Guide
SAS Enterprise Guide is a Microsoft Windows client application that provides a guided mechanism to use SAS and publish dynamic results throughout an organization in a uniform way. It is marketed as the default interface to SAS for business analysts, statisticians, and programmers. Though Data Integration Studio is the true ETL tool of SAS, Enterprise Guide can be used for the ETL of smaller projects.
Enterprise Miner
A data mining tool
Information Delivery Portal
Allows a user to setup a personalized homepage where they can view automatically generated reports, dashboards, and other SAS data structures.
Without that they have different business oriented module for different industry like finance/Clinical etc
