SAS is an integrated system of software products that provides an applications development environment for accessing, managing, analyzing, and presenting data. With SAS, you can

• read data in any format, from any kind of file, and manipulate it any way you choose. Your data can reside on numerous platforms and servers, in a multitude of formats.

• ensure the quality of your data using built-in and customizable data transformations. Use the powerful transformation language provided by SAS to handle everything from validation and scrubbing to integration and structuring, including denormalization and summarization.

• create analyses to concisely summarize your data. For example, you can generate frequency counts and cross-tabulation tables.

• compute correlations and other measures of association, as well as multi-way cross-tabulations and inferential statistics.

• perform predictive and descriptive modeling, forecasting, simulation, and optimization.

At the center of SAS is Base SAS Software, which provides basic tools for accessing, managing, analyzing, and presenting data. You can extend the capabilites of SAS by adding the solutions such as SAS Analytic Intelligence, SAS Risk Management, or SAS/Warehouse Administrator. SAS offers several solutions that address specific enterprise intelligence needs. For more information about SAS solutions, refer to the SAS Web site, http://www.sas.com.

To use the SAS Bridge for ESRI, you must have Base SAS software. The SAS Bridge for ESRI must be installed on the same machine as ArcGIS. You can use the SAS Bridge for ESRI to connect to a SAS session running either on the same machine (a local session) or on another machine (a remote session). To connect to a remote SAS session, you must have SAS Integration Technologies installed. SAS Bridge for ESRI must be licensed for use on the copy of SAS that you connect to.

Note: For Version 1 of the SAS Bridge for ESRI, only local connections to a SAS session are supported.