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Base SAS Software, Release 8.2

What's New Highlights

Base SAS software is at the epicenter of SAS solutions because it provides the essential tools for mastering the four data-driven tasks that are common to virtually all applications: data access, management, analysis and presentation. As your business needs grow and change, you can extend the power of base SAS software with other integrated SAS solutions.

According to SAS developer Rick Langston, one of 8.2's primary attributes is its stability. "Our longtime customers will be happy to hear that the stability of this release is about equal to the standard of our 6.12 version," says Langston. "We had time to incorporate a lot of customer feedback on Version 8 features, and we feel this release is very solid in functionality and performance." Here are some of the highlights.

Cross-Environment Data Access (CEDA)
Originally available only to SAS/CONNECT software users, CEDA is now available to all SAS users through base SAS software. CEDA enables your SAS programs to directly access SAS data files that were created in another operating environment. Though the data transfer and remote library services in SAS/CONNECT software remain advantageous in some circumstances, CEDA simplifies direct access and FTP transfer of data from one operating environment to another.

Enhanced Editor
In Version 8, the Enhanced Editor was introduced as a new environment for writing and editing SAS programs. Release 8.2 offers enhancements that are based on your feedback. Enhancements include the ability to open a second view on the same SAS Program File or other text document by using the "New Window" item in the Window menu, and support for filerefs and aggregates in the INCLUDE and FILE commands.

ODS
One of the most enthusiastically received developments in Version 8 has been the Output Delivery System (ODS), which implements and controls the formatting of all SAS procedure output. ODS provides an almost limitless number of choices for reporting and displaying analytical results in visually appealing formats. In addition to the original SAS listing, output data sets and HTML that debuted with Version 8, Release 8.2 now provides production support for PostScript, PCL, PDF and RTF output formats. XML support by ODS is still experimental, but now has a much more robust feature set.

ODS provides template definitions that define the structure of the output from procedures and from the DATA step. You can customize the output by modifying these definitions or by creating your own with Version 8's PROC TEMPLATE, which has also been enhanced.

Universal Printing
Universal Printing is a portable printing solution that provides dialogs and wizards for much-improved printing capabilities on platforms where printing can be more troublesome. Print formats supported by Universal Printing include PostScript, PCL and PDF, allowing print preview by readily available third-party viewer software. Universal Printing is available for UNIX, PC, and the mainframe (new in Release 8.2). A new procedure, PROC PRTDEF, also helps systems administrators set up multiple printer definitions for a site.

Sending E-mail from SAS Using the SMTP Interface
Now a production feature with 8.2, you can now use the FILENAME, EMAIL (SMTP) Access Method to send electronic mail programmatically from SAS. For instance, you can use the logic of a SAS DATA step to subset an e-mail distribution list from a large data set of addresses.

New Functions and Enhanced Procedures
Release 8.2 includes enhancements to often-used procedures such as FREQ, UNIVARIATE and SQL, allowing broader access to certain statistics and query capabilities and more control of output.

The REPORT procedure now supports the FORMCHAR option. If you use ODS to create output from PROC REPORT, you can set style attributes like font and color for various parts of the report. The REPORT procedure also now supports Quantile statistics. These percentiles include the median, P1, P5, P10, P25, P75, P90, P95, and P99. New options in the PROC statement control how the procedure computes the Quantile statistics.

The SUMMARY and TABULATE procedures provide greater control over content and using SAS formats and secondary data sets, as well as allowing multiple CLASS and VARIABLE statements. The SUMMARY procedure also has two new statements, TYPES and WAYS, that provide control over the CLASS combinations that are analyzed, as well as a new OUTPUT statement option that is useful for TopN reporting.

In addition, the REPORT, TABULATE and PRINT procedures include a host of new stylistic controls via the STYLE options, which work with ODS to produce advanced HTML, RTF, PDF and PostScript output. The PRINT procedure now makes it easy to display uniform column widths.

In Release 8.2, when a request is made to compress a SAS data set with either the COMPRESS= data set option or the COMPRESS= system option and SAS can determine that the compressed file will be larger than an uncompressed file, a warning is issued and the compression does not take place.

The SQL procedure contains three new joins. CROSS JOIN produces the crossproduct of two tables. NATURAL JOIN selects rows from two tables that have equal values in columns that share the same name. UNION JOIN returns a union of the columns of both tables.

Powerful new functions and operations in PROC SQL include:

Globalization and National Language Support
Release 8.2 extends national character support for mainframes while maintaining consistency with applications that were developed with previous versions of SAS. The new LOCALE option lets you specify the selected encoding format. This applies to data as well as to code. FILE, FILENAME and INFILE statements support the new ENCODING= option that enables users to dynamically change the character set encoding for processing external data. In addition, support for Unicode character encoding formats and informats has been improved. European currency conversion features are now available.

Macro Facility
The new %SYMDEL macro deletes the listed variables from the macro global symbol table. Also, there are two new automatic macro variables: SYSPROCNAME is an automatic macro variable whose value indicates what the SAS language processor is currently executing. The value can be either DATASTEP or the name of a SAS procedure. SYSMACRONAME is an automatic macro variable that returns the name of the currently executing macro.

What's New Details