{"id":17,"date":"2005-11-04T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-11-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/wordpress\/?p=17"},"modified":"2005-11-04T19:00:00","modified_gmt":"2005-11-05T00:00:00","slug":"a-week-of-sas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2005\/11\/04\/a-week-of-sas\/","title":{"rendered":"A week of SAS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThis week has seen a lot of SAS work, so that&#8217;s what my head is full of right now.\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>\nAfter several weeks of intensive SAS usage, I&#8217;m finally reaching what would be called &ldquo;conversational&rdquo; 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 &ndash; &ldquo;speaking SAS&rdquo; 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.\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>\nI have scrolled through and inspected a dataset of ca 121,000 rows of data. Manually. Twice. Good thing there&#8217;s a Find command in the dataset viewer (no quick filter, though&#8230;)\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>\nI&#8217;ve found myself entering a paragraph break after each sentence, and finishing each paragraph with a semicolon in an e-mail.\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>\nI&#8217;ve started using SQL more seriously. It&#8217;s SAS&#8217;s own version of SQL, but that appears to be (a subset of) ANSI SQL with some SAS-specific additions &ndash; so hopefully most of what I learn by doing this will be useful elsewhere as well. I&#8217;ve advanced from simple &#8220;SELECT * FROM table WHERE&#8221; 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 &ldquo;pure SAS code&rdquo; equivalent &ndash; and a lot more elegant.\n<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nHmm&#8230; perhaps it&#8217;s time I got myself a SAS book. This feels like a great reason to go and do some bookshopping this weekend!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week has been full of SAS work, so that&#8217;s what my head is full of right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geeky_things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}