SAS® 9.3 Software
SAS 9.3 was released in July 2011; first maintenance release, SAS 9.3 TS1M1, became available in December 2011; and second maintenance release SAS 9.3 TS1M2, became available in August 2012.
Core analytical products are now released every 12–18 months and are independent of Base SAS. To mark this independence, these products now have their own release numbers—the August 2012 releases are numbered 12.1—and they are available with SAS 9.3 TS1M2. If you have a current license for a product that has a new 12.1 release, you can update that product by installing SAS 9.3 TS1M2. For more information about the 12.1 releases, see Highlights of New Features.
The phrases “big data” and “big analytics” have suddenly taken center stage as industry buzzwords but, as a SAS user, you know that the substance behind these buzzwords has always been at the heart of what we do. SAS Analytics continue to help you solve critical problems and, with the release of SAS 9.3, we’ve added new algorithms and functionality that mean you can address issues in new ways and tackle your organization’s “big” problems.
New Features
- SAS/STAT®:
- Finite mixture models
- Random effects for Bayesian models
- Cox regression for sample survey data
- SAS/ETS®:
- Powerful and versatile tools for state space modeling and forecasting of time series and longitudinal data
- Data access engine SASEXCCM for the CRSP/COMPUSTAT Merged Database
- New features for modeling the size of losses or insurance claims
- SAS/QC®:
- Fit Gumbel, inverse Gaussian, generalized Pareto, power function, and Rayleigh distributions
- Fit parametric models for recurrent events data and construct probability plots for models based on a three-parameter Weibull distribution for lifetime data
- SAS/IML®:
- Call SAS procedures and DATA steps
- Provides an interface to the R statistical programming language
- New functions and subroutines
- SAS® Enterprise Miner™:
- Standardized Web Infrastructure Platform midtier services for data integration, BI, SAS solutions and analytics
- New survival analysis predicts when an event will happen, not just if it will happen
- Procedures optimized for utility file usage and SAS code optimized for efficient file usage
- SAS® Forecast Server:
- Ability to define customized time intervals
- Rolling simulation lets you interactively simulate a forecasting process
- Auxiliary data set support
- SAS® Model Manager:
- Improved analytic workflow management
- Seamless integration of R models with the ability to register and manage R models in SAS Model Manager
- SAS/OR® and SAS® Simulation Studio
- New network simplex linear programming algorithm
- New multistart capability for nonlinear programming solvers.
- Improved usability to simplify navigation of large models.
Text analytics
- SAS®Text Miner
- Enhanced language support (now supporting 27 languages plus dialects)
- New text import capabilities for sourcing file system and Web data
- Reuse synonym data sets and other usability enhancements
Other Resources
- Migrating to SAS 9.3
- Analytics Fact Sheets
- Statistics and Operations Research Focus Area
SAS Data Management combines data integration, data quality and master data management in a single framework with a common user interface. We recognize that the challenges you face in managing your data are becoming more complex, and we continue to develop our products based on your input. With an upgrade to SAS 9.3, you’ll get data management enhancements such as improved automation of certain tasks, more reporting options, and better versioning and rollback.
New Features
- Major usability improvements: unified data quality interface and more flexible reporting
- Incorporates DataFlux Data Management Platform for data quality
- Better performance: new templates for enhanced SQL passthru to support in-database SQL processing
- New metadata search and column metadata standardization
Associated Products
Other Resources
Technical Papers
We’ve created online resources below to guide you in your upgrade to SAS 9.3. The hardware requirements and sizing for our initial release of SAS 9.3 are very similar to SAS 9.2 and, as always, SAS has support staff ready to answer your questions. In anticipation of the SAS 9.3 release, SAS Technical Support has prepared an FAQ to prepare you for an upgrade.
New Features
- You can read about the SAS 9.3 enhancements to Base SAS – for example, the SAS windowing environment defaults to HTML output and ODS Graphics – in our Products and Solutions A-Z listing.
- The listing has been updated to reflect SAS 9.3 enhancements to products such as SAS/GRAPH® and SAS/ACCESS®
Changes in Support and Third-Party Components
- OpenVMS Itanium and Windows on Itanium not supported in SAS 9.3.
- Not supporting: Mid-tier deployments on Windows 32-bit operating systems for SAS 9.3.
- SAS 9.3 memory requirements for the mid-tier require 64-bit memory space.
Migration Resources
SAS Reporting lets you view, author and share reports to help you make better and faster decisions. With SAS 9.3, you’ll get new features that will assist you in finding information faster without having to rely on your IT department.
As SAS evolves our reporting capabilities, we continue to rely on our community of users to help us innovate. Whether you’re a novice or an expert at SAS Reporting, you might want to bookmark our Programming and Reporting forums on the Communities on SAS site.
Enhancements
- With SAS Web Report Studio, users can change the appearance of graphs with built-in skins authorized users can open tables and cubes directly.
- With SAS BI Dashboard, two new configuration properties are available for data caching, enabling you to determine the frequency with which configuration objects or dashboard objects are updated.
- SAS® Enterprise Guide® has a wealth of goodies – especially for SAS programmers. Enhancements include a program "tidy" feature to format your programs for readability and a SAS code analyzer to create a process-flow view from your existing programs.