This week has seen a lot of SAS work, so that’s what my head is full of right now.

• After several weeks of intensive SAS usage, I’m finally reaching what would be called “conversational” for a human language. (This came after a lull of over a month where I was mostly working in Excel and VBA). I can express any basic concept, and no longer need to search for words every time I open my mouth – “speaking SAS” has gone from frustrating to enjoyable. Now I can start working on getting rid of my accent, and increasing my vocabulary so that I can express myself better. In programming terms, rather than just get things done, I can look for cleaner, faster, more efficient solutions.

• I have scrolled through and inspected a dataset of ca 121,000 rows of data. Manually. Twice. Good thing there’s a Find command in the dataset viewer (no quick filter, though…)

• I’ve found myself entering a paragraph break after each sentence, and finishing each paragraph with a semicolon in an e-mail.

• I’ve started using SQL more seriously. It’s SAS’s own version of SQL, but that appears to be (a subset of) ANSI SQL with some SAS-specific additions – so hopefully most of what I learn by doing this will be useful elsewhere as well. I’ve advanced from simple “SELECT * FROM table WHERE” to queries that include joins, summary functions, groups etc. It is very powerful (which is no surprise) and some of it is a lot faster than the “pure SAS code” equivalent – and a lot more elegant.

Hmm… perhaps it’s time I got myself a SAS book. This feels like a great reason to go and do some bookshopping this weekend!