Get a jump start on the conference by taking advantage of Sunday Workshops being offered on NESUG 2011 opening day! These workshops provide you an opportunity to explore a topic not otherwise offered during the conference, or to delve more deeply into a topic of interest to you. They are available for a fee of $95 per workshop for registered attendees and $150 per workshop for others.  Just click the appropriate boxes when registering on-line. Please note that space is limited and registration will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis at the conference. The workshops are:

SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 - Getting to Know You   

(Andy Ravenna, SAS Institute)

This workshop introduces Enterprise Guide version 4.2 to both old and new users of SAS. It focuses on the key points of a typical Enterprise Guide session: creating a project, accessing your data, building a query, and producing a report. It also answers several common questions that typically come up for first-time and more experienced users, such as 'Why can't I sort my data?' and 'How can I change the task code?' Attendees receive enough information about this version such that they can return to the office with confidence and get started with Enterprise Guide.

Tagsets and the Ultimate Control over Your ODS Output  

(Mike Molter, d-Wise Technologies)

In this workshop we'll see how the tagset allows us to grab hold of the wheel and write the markup file with the same control that we have with the DATA step.  Rather than a blur of analysis and display, we'll see the output process as the familiar combination of data collection, manipulation, and writing.  We'll see the tagset as our key into this process.

Analyzing Complex Survey Data in SAS  

(Taylor Lewis, U.S. Office of Personnel Management)

This course introduces the statistical and syntactical modifications necessary when analyzing complex survey data.  Specifically, attendees will gain an understanding of when and how to employ the SURVEY family of SAS procedures-for instance, PROC SURVEYMEANS and PROC SURVEYREG.  "Complex" implies data containing one or more of the following features: stratification, clustering, unequal respondent weights, or finite population correction factors.  Each of these features is presented with illustrative examples demonstrating why in practice it is often beneficial or necessary to deviate from the more familiar simple random sample design.

Queries, Joins, and WHERE Clauses, Oh My! Demystifying PROC SQL

(Christianna Williams, Independent Consultant)

This workshop will present a series of increasingly complex examples to illustrate the function of each of PROC SQL's clauses, with particular focus on problems that would be difficult to solve with "traditional" SAS code.  And after all, PROC SQL is part of Base SAS; so, though you may need to learn a few new keywords to become an SQL wizard, no special license is required!

Click here for more detailed descriptions and author bios.

Special New Sections

Photo courtesy of the Greater Portland Convention & Visitors Bureau

We have created some new sections to specifically address some of the most popular subjects that users want to learn more about.

DATA STEP PROGRAMMING

The Data Step Programming section is a combination of beginning, intermediate and advanced topics which focus on programming within the data step.  Presentations will focus on how the SAS® System creates a data set, including the compilation and execution phases, and the role of the program data vector (PDV).  Topics include: data step efficiency, data step merges, new features available in SAS 9.2.  Presentations will be geared either toward learning opportunities for newer SAS users or best practices for those with more experience.

LARGE DATA SETS

Some programming practices that cause no real problems when working with smaller datasets (e.g., those with fewer than 256 columns and 10 million rows) can generate significant obstacles when working with large datasets.  These include, but are not limited to, (a) excessive I/O, (b) extensive and high-maintenance scripts, (c) network access and throughput constraints, (d) inefficient retrieval of subsets, and (e) Sparse data.  The NESUG 2011 section on Large Data Sets presents papers on these topics using such techniques as hash lookup, formats, SGIO, the bufNo= option, the SAS Bulk Loader, the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) model, and the point= option.  Although the topic is rather advanced, papers present solutions that range from those that are very simple to implement to advanced techniques.  The papers are oriented as tutorials or case studies.

FINANCE
 

Finance-related applications and research constitute the second largest customer segment of SAS users. This section is intended to encourage those users to not only provide insights into SAS finance-related products (e.g. SAS/ETS, SAS/HPF), but also user implementations of financial analysis tasks such as: Portfolio Backtesting, Risk Assessment and Valuation, High Frequency Financial Data Analysis, Credit scoring, and Text analysis of SEC filings. The Finance section features papers that describe methods to perform these and similar tasks dealing with time-stamped or other financial data. Both advanced (e.g. national-best-bid-and-offer) and beginner-level (e.g. generating accounting

reports) papers will be presented. 

PROC FORMAT

The FORMAT procedure is a very useful and powerful procedure in SAS. Not only does it allow you to generate user defined look-up tables it can aid you in merging large data sets without having to sort the large data set. PICTURE formats are also useful to modify numeric data for output and work with date and time variables. The NESUG 2011 Format Section will feature papers that describe applications of PROC FORMAT and illustrate the simplicity of generating your own user defined FORMATS, INFORMATS, and PICTURE FORMATS.
 

PROC SQL

The SQL procedure provides access to data sets using industry-wide standards not inherent in the DATA step.  These standards are generally portable to other relational database systems; the skills learned can be applied in those other environments and the scripts can be explicitly or implicitly passed from SAS to other RDBMS.  Furthermore, PROC SQL provides direct access to the DICTIONARY tables - a set of SAS® tables that store metadata or control the SAS® System and its processing. 

The NESUG 2011 section on PROC SQL presents papers on these topics using such techniques as explicit SQL pass-through, the into directive, recursive joins, and fuzzy matches, as well as efficiencies.  This is essentially a tutorials section, although some papers are presented as case studies. 

Click here for more information about all the sections.  

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