Course Highlight

Instructor Kathy Kiraly Discusses SQL Processing with SAS Course

SQL Processing with SAS is one of SAS Education's most popular courses. To explain why and whether this course is for you, we spoke with Kathy Kiraly, a veteran SAS user and long-time SQL instructor. Kathy was involved in updating the course with SAS 8 and SAS 9 and helped develop the course content for SAS Online Tutor and Self-Paced eLearning SQL modules. Kathy also conducted technical reviews for several SQL books from SAS' Books by Users series. Kathy has also consulted on the technical review for the SQL questions on the SAS certification exam. Kathy has been with SAS for 18 years and has taught SQL for 12 years.

Which job roles would benefit most from attending this course and why?

PROC SQL is a straight-forward procedure, easy to learn and the perfect complement to the DATA step. Anyone who needs to manipulate, summarize and join data will enjoy this class.

What specific tools/skills will students gain from attending this course?

Folks will learn the syntax for PROC SQL and how to incorporate other SAS features into this ANSI-standard (American National Standards Institute) language. They'll learn an easy and efficient way to query, group, summarize and join SAS data. They can then create tables from the query results. Macro users will also see how to incorporate that knowledge into their SQL code.

What specific business pains are addressed?

Everyone needs to access their data. The SQL procedure is a simple way to read your data, create new columns and (probably the best feature) join your data. SQL is the language of relational databases such as Oracle and DB2. If you have relational database data, the PROC SQL query can be implicitly passed to that underlying database for processing. Folks who have used SQL in other databases can hit the ground running with PROC SQL. The beauty of PROC SQL is that you also have the rest of SAS at your disposal. PROC SQL can create tables that can then be used in other SAS procedures. SAS has wonderful analytics, cool functions and data set options that can be applied to data that has been accessed, manipulated and joined with SQL. It's a nice marriage of the two worlds.

What tangible results do you hope students will see after taking SQL?

Folks will have, along with the DATA step, another method to query and manipulate their data. I personally love SQL and teaching this class, which shows great ways to use SQL, a standard language, and SAS to get the most from your data.

Register for SQL Processing with SAS today.