Friday, October 09, 2009

SAS On Demand: Enterprise Miner -- Update

Following up on my previous posting about using SAS Enterprise Minder via the On Demand platform: From continued communication with experts at SAS, it turns out that with the EM version 5.3, which is the one available through On Demand, there is no way to work (or even access) non-SAS files. Their suggestion solution is to use some other SAS product like SAS BASE, or even SAS JMP (which is available through the On Demand platform) in order to convert your CSV files to SAS data files...

From both a pedagogical and practical point of view, I am reluctant to introduce SAS EM through On Demand to my MBA students. They will dislike the idea of downloading, learning, and using yet another software package (even if it is a client) just for the purpose of file conversion (from ordinary CSV files into SAS data files).

So at this point it seems as though SAS EM via the On Demand platform may be useful in SAS-based courses that use SAS data files. Hopefully SAS will upgrade the version to the latest, which is supposed to be able to handle non-SAS data files.

3 comments:

Daniel Lee said...

Hi Professor Shmueli,

I really enjoyed your tutorial on SAS Enterprise. Do you recommend any books or online free courses to continue learning SAS?

Thank you,

Daniel Lee

Galit Shmueli said...

Daniel - Let me check with the experts at SAS EM (I suppose you mean Enterprise Miner) and post what I find out. Also check out Blackboard (Course Area> Software Installation) for a PDF with a step-by-step tutorial of SAS EM using some familiar data. This was created by a terrific past TA of the course in 2005.

Unknown said...

I was a SAS programmer for a few years before I came back to school. Even with the familiarity I had I was intimidated by the SAS tools. I don't think it is possible to learn data mining techniques and SAS at the same time. It would be overwhelming and prone to mistakes. A new user would not know if the technique was wrong or if the configured SAS wrong.

As MBA students we are all familiar with excel, that is why XLminer works well for us. The learning curve involves only the techniques that are new to us.