SAS- A Self Service Data Preparation Software

Developed by SAS Institute, SAS stands for Statistical Analysis System is a software suite which facilitates advanced analytics, business intelligence, multivariate analysis, data management, and predictive analysis. SAS helps more than 80,000 customer sites to perform better by making better decisions. SAS being a leader in business analytics software and service, provides valuable insights on your business perspectives. It paves a way to discover new routes to success and fix things which isn’t working.The software transforms large data into usable analytics which can be used to refine your business strategies.

Technical Overview

SAS software suite helps businesses to store, alter, manage and retrieve data from different sources and to perform the statistical analysis on the data. The software provides advanced options such asgraphical point-and-click user interface through the SAS programming language, such that even the non-technical users find it easy to work with the system. The data must be in Excel table format or SAS format in order to use the SAS.

SAS software programs have two steps: DATA step and PROC step. DATA step helps retrieve and manipulate the data which outputs a SAS Data set. PROC step analyses the data. All the steps comprise a series of statements.

The DATA step comprises the executable statements and decorative statements. The executable statements direct the software to take action whereas the decorative statements provide instructions to read or alter the data set and its appearance. The DATA step constitutes of two phases, which are compilation and execution. The declarative statements are processed and the syntax errors are pointed out during the compilation phase. Each executable statementcan be processed sequentially in the execution phase. The data sets are organized into tables which comprise rows and columns. The rows are called ‘observations’ and columns are called ‘variables’.

The PROC step comprises the PROC statements. They call the named procedures which perform analysis and reporting on data sets. The resulting information from the PROC step is the statistics, analysis report, and graphics. PROC consists of more than 300 procedures and each such procedure contains the substantial body of programming as well as statistical work. They display the results, sort the data, and perform other data operations. Pieces of code are coded once and referenced in multiple places to assist the repetitive task by using SAS Macros.

SAS comprises the Output Delivery System which assists to publish the data in HTML, Excel, PDF or other required formats. The SAS point-and-click interface helps to generate the code in order to manipulate the data and perform analysis on data, which does not require any prior SAS programming knowledge.

Components of SAS

The SAS software suite comprises more than 200 components out of which some components are mentioned below:

• Base SAS – Basic procedures and data management


• SAS/OR – Operations research


• SAS/ETS – Econometrics and Time Series Analysis


• SAS/IML – Interactive matrix language


• SAS/INSIGHT – Data mining


• SAS/PH – Clinical trial analysis


• SAS/STAT – Statistical analysis


• SAS/GRAPH – Graphics and presentation


• Enterprise Miner – data mining


• Enterprise Guide - GUI based code editor & project manager


• SAS/AF – Applications facility


• SAS/QC – Quality control


• SAS EBI - Suite of Business Intelligence Applications


• SAS Grid Manager - Manager of SAS grid computing environment

Benefits of SAS

• Delivers an intelligent platform within reachable budget which includes all the IT needs to run the web applications.


• Provides a complete and robust platform for information delivery within the enterprise. Distributing the information to required personals in the enterprise is very crucial which boosts the decision-making skills and the performance of the organization.


• SAS Analytics and SAS Business Intelligence provide a simple yet effective way to provide SAS intelligence to the customers irrespective of their location, user interface and the desired output format. This flexibility helps saving the resource time thereby increasing the user productivity.


• SAS offers a centralized web-based administration and user-friendly interface for data preparation and management. This interface assists to monitor the server performance, manage, and receive alerts and to generate performance reports.


• A SAS administrator has the capability to track the run-time of job flows.