What's New

What's New in Base SAS 9.2: Overview

Supported Operating Environments

SAS 9.2 supports new operating systems and hardware that includes Microsoft Windows x64 editions, Linux on x86-64-based CPUs and Solaris 10 x64. Also new for SAS 9.2 is support for OpenVMS on HP Integrity (Itanium) servers. OpenVMS on Integrity servers support a product set similar to what is offered on OpenVMS Alpha systems. SAS 9.2 continues to support key platforms for SAS, including Microsoft Windows 2003 (32-bit) server families, IBM's z/OS, Sun's Solaris on SPARC, IBM's AIX on Power, HP-UX on Itanium and PA-RISC, and Red Hat and Novell's Linux 32-bit distributions.

Migration

The MIGRATE procedure now supports more cross-environment migrations to SAS 9.2.

ODS (Output Delivery System) and Output Formatting

ODS packages enable ODS destinations to use the SAS Publishing Framework, which is a feature of SAS Integration Technologies. An ODS package tracks the output from any active destinations that connect with it. After the destinations close, the package can be published to any of the publish destinations.

Measured RTF output enables you to specify how and where page breaks occur and when to place titles and footnotes into the body of a page.

Inline formatting has new syntax and can now be nested. With inline formatting you can change border styles individually.

Style element inheritance has been enhanced in SAS 9.2. In addition, the functionality of the REPLACE statement has been completely incorporated into the STYLE statement.

The TEMPLATE procedure now enables you to customize the appearance of crosstabulation (contingency) tables that are created with the FREQ procedure.

You can now define styles by using TEMPLATE procedure syntax as well as cascading style sheets (CSS).

You can use table header and footer style elements in the TEMPLATE procedure to change the borders of the regions that surround the table header and footer.

The PRINT procedure now enables the insertion of blank lines and the BY variable label on the summary line, as well as formatting of large numbers.

Universal Printing

New Universal Printers include PNG (Portable Network Graphics), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and PDFA, a printer that produces archivable PDF files that are compliant with PDF/A-1b. All Universal Printers now render TrueType fonts for output in all operating environments, including 31 new TrueType fonts.

Several new system options enable you to control the use, layout, viewing, security, description, metatadata, and printing options of PDF documents.

National Language Support

SAS 9.2 adds support for numerous locales and language encodings, as well as international currency informats and formats, and alternate collating sequences such as linguistic collation.

SAS Remote Browsing

In all operating environments except for Windows, the SAS Remote Browser replaces the SAS Help Browser. You now view SAS documentation and other Web pages specified by the WBROWSE command in the Web browser on your computer.

User-Written Functions

You can now write your own functions in either C, C++, or the SAS language, and use them in a SAS program. External functions that are written in C or C++ can be used in SAS programs once they have been registered using the PROTO procedure. To write your own functions using the SAS language, you use the FCMP procedure. The new FUNCTIONS DICTIONARY table contains information about all functions that can be used in SAS.

IPv6

To support the "next generation" of Internet protocol, SAS supports the new IPv6 Internet protocol as well as the current IPv4 protocol.

Web Messaging Protocol

The SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) procedure enables a Web messaging protocol that invokes a Web service through the Java Native Interface (JNI) and the Axis2 Java Client.

Performance

SAS programs that run in batch mode and terminate before they complete can be resumed at the DATA or PROC step that follows the last completed DATA or PROC step.

The SQL procedure has been optimized to improve the performance of queries to external databases and SAS libraries.

The SORT procedure determines whether a data set has already been sorted before it attempts to sort a data set.

The IBUFNO system option enables you to specify an optional number of extra buffers to be allocated for navigating an index file.

You can specify when SAS files are written to disk by using the new FILESYNC system option.

Security

SAS now supports the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) data encryption algorithm. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and SSH (Secure Shell) are now supported in the z/OS operating environment.

The Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) access method provides a secure connection and file transfers between two hosts (client and server), over a network, where both commands and data are encrypted.

The PWENCODE procedure now supports the sas003 encoding method, which uses a 256-bit key encryption method to generate encoded passwords.

You can now specify in the LIBNAME statement whether user ID and password credentials are necessary when accessing a WebDAV server.

Diagnostics

The SCAPROC procedure is a SAS Code Analyzer that captures information in a file about the input, output, variables, and macros for a SAS job while the job is running.

The JAVAINFO procedure reports diagnostic information about the Java environment that SAS is using.

Procedures

The REPORT procedure enables you to specify that group and order variable cells span table rows.

The TABULATE procedure enables you to specify variable name list shortcuts within the TABLE statement.

In addition to query performance improvements, the SQL procedure now accesses two new dictionary tables, the FUNCTIONS and INFORMATS DICTIONARY tables.

Output from the OPTIONS procedure can now display the value of an environment variable as well as a list of system option groups.

The new ID statement for the CORR procedure specifies one or more additional tip variables to identify observations in scatter plots and scatter plot matrices.

The FREQ procedure can now produce frequency plots, cumulative frequency plots, deviation plots, odds ratio plots, and kappa plots by using ODS Graphics. The crosstabulation table now has an ODS template that you can customize using the TEMPLATE procedure. Equivalence and noninferiority tests are now available for the binomial proportion and the proportion difference. New confidence limits for the binomial proportion include Agresti-Coull, Jeffreys, and Wilson (score) confidence limits. The RISKDIFF option in the EXACT statement provides unconditional exact confidence limits for the proportion (risk) difference. The EQOR option in the EXACT statement provides Zelen's exact test for equal odds ratios.

The UNIVARIATE procedure now produces graphs that conform to ODS styles, so that creating consistent output is easier. Also, you now have two alternative methods for producing graphs. With traditional graphics, you can control every detail of a graph through familiar procedure syntax and the GOPTION and SYMBOL statements. With ODS Graphics (experimental for the UNIVARIATE procedure in SAS 9.2), you can obtain the highest quality output with minimal syntax and full compatibility with graphics that are produced by the SAS/STAT and SAS/ETS procedures.

The new UNIVARIATE procedure CDFPLOT statement plots the observed cumulative distribution function (cdf) of a variable and enables you to superimpose a fitted theoretical distribution on the graph. The new PPPLOT statement creates a probability-probability plot (also referred to as a P-P plot or percent plot), which compares the empirical cumulative distribution function (ecdf) of a variable with a specified theoretical cumulative distribution function. The beta, exponential, gamma, lognormal, normal, and Weibull distributions are availbable in both statements.

Language Elements

Files that are located in an aggregate storage location whose filename does not comply with SAS naming conventions can now be accessed through the %INCLUDE, FILE, and the INFILE statements. A new DATA statement option enables notes to be written to the SAS log at the beginning and end of each level of nested DO statements.

Several new informats and formats read and write date, time, and datetime data that is formatted according to ISO 8601.

New character functions return information about character position or words in a character string. Other new functions return date and time interval and various mathematical computations. Several functions from other SAS products that return date or time information are now part of Base SAS.

New automatic macro variables contain information about the SAS session encoding, the local and remote computer names, and SAS log error and warning messages

Many new system options support the new SAS 9.2 features. Others support e-mail, SAS/GRAPH features, macro enhancements, and a default logical record length.

Copyright 2007 by SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA. All rights reserved.