My 10 wishes for SAS

No wonder that SAS 9.3 is one of SAS’s greatest products. Beyond it, I have 10 secret wishes and hope the far-away SAS 9.3.2 or SAS 9.4 might realize them someday.

1. Trigger for SAS dataset
A wonderful thing about SAS is that it can be used as a RDBMS with full functionality. Just one piece from the SQL language is missing in SAS - trigger. Adding triggers would bring more security for SAS datasets or data views, and automate some routine operations. 

2. PROC PIVOT for pivot table
Pivot table is a huge business success, since I found that every boss loves to do point-and-click data aggregation in Excel (why not they just use the simple PROC FREQ of SAS?). I often spend many hours to painfully decorate a pivot table. A procedure that directly exports SAS’ dataset to pivot-table-contained Excel spreadsheet is going to be a big plus.

3. Visible hash objects
Hash object offers an efficient alternative to the hard disk based Data Step programming. Michele Burlew’s new book  this fall would be a milestone for this emerging technology since SAS 9.1. If SAS windowing environment provides the views for the hash objects through the library explorer, matching or lookup on the hash objects would be better perceived.

4. A multi-threading LOGISTIC procedure
Last week Rick introduced how to open multiple workspace instances to make SAS/IML multi-threading. For many SAS users, PROC LOGISTIC is worthy of the half price they paid for SAS. It seems that SAS is developing a multi-threading HPLOGISTIC procedure for Teradata or in-database technology. However, at the age of big data, a multi-threading LOGISTIC procedure is still very much desired in SAS/STAT.

5. A system options for decimal digits
It is well known that to export the tables by ODS and then change the formats would allow displaying more decimal places for SAS’s outputs. However, a system option specifying the number of digits in the result would save coding time.

/*******************OPTION 1 ***********************************************

* From NOTE 37106 at support.sas.com/kb/37/106.html 

* How can I display more or fewer decimal places in procedure results

* -- Change the decimal places for a table 

****************************************************************************/

ods output parameterestimates = pe;

proc reg data = sashelp.class;

   model Weight = Height;

run; 

proc print data = pe label noobs; 

   format _numeric_ 12.8 ;

run;



/*******************OPTION 2 ***********************************************

* From Robin High at http://listserv.uga.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0704b&L=sas-l&P=73559

* Re: How to display p value with more dicimal digits

* -- Change  the decimal places for all p-values 

****************************************************************************/

proc template;

   define column Common.PValue;

      format = pvalue12.8; 

   end;

run;

proc reg data = sashelp.class;

   model Weight = Height;

run; 

6. Support vector machine in SAS/STAT
Although SAS Enterprise Miner 7.1 has two procedures: PROC SVM and PROC SVMSCORE, they seem primitive and only apply for bivariate response variable. A procedure for SVM in SAS/STAT alongside the robust GLM-based procedures there would relieve many desperate SAS coders who got projects to do SVM with SAS.

7. A trial version (or learning edition)
One friend of mine is still using SAS 6 and insists that it is the culminating product. If there is a trial edition of SAS 9.3 available he can taste, he probably will change the idea. A learning edition with no cost or little cost can attract more people to start to learn SAS.

8. PROC TEXTCLOUD
Text cloud is a fancy visualization tool, although it does nothing about statistics. For example, Rick summarized his first 100 blog posts by it. R also has a nice package ' wordcloud'. A text cloud procedure would definitely make SAS more fun.

9. Random forest in Enterprise Miner
Random forest is one of the popular classification methods, which has not been included in Enterprise Miner 7.1 yet. Hope in the future it could become one of the modeling nodes.

10. Reasonably priced SAS cloud
Amazon is earning a windfall of money by its cloud services. And many start-ups provide R clouds. A PC SAS or UNIX SAS cloud may be a lucrative business for SAS. And I will be happy to show SAS to my friends on iPad or Android phone.