At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege • Hacker News Board

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#21

Post by earl » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 8:47 AM UTC

bayareaguy wrote: post #12

hyperbovine wrote: post #2

I think the article misses an important point: SAS is a generational thing, and the influence of generation that cut their teeth on SAS and VAX mainframes in the 1980s is waning. There's a reason why the SAS ads you see in the airports are all targeted at management--because that's where all those people work now. And soon they will retire. They would never dare advertise to the poor analysts who are forced to actual…

There are a few areas where SAS is unrivaled--it can crunch huge data and exploit parallel processing So is their real competition Hadoop and the other Map/Reduce frameworks?

Yeah. It used to be that SAS, like Oracle, was the only place to turn to when you had very large quantity of data. The internet has added multiple orders of magnitude to large, and people now use MR frameworks.

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#22

Post by earl » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 8:48 AM UTC

zzleeper wrote: post #11

physcab wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen SAS code before. I'll take your word that it's ugly. However, if SAS can adopt new standards, I hardly see them waning. Companies will always be thirsty for better ways to understand their customers, and now with the ease at which new internet companies are started and more people become connected, the demand for those services is only going to increase. If SAS can continue to outperform by investing i…

It's not ugly. It's hideous. I use Stata (commercial) and R (free), and both have a much better language. The only reason why people I know use SAS is to deal with very-big datasets directly, instead of having to partition the data by hand.

To be fair, SAS for stats has been dead for a decade. Their "state of the art" lags R by at least that much...

Re: At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege

#23

Post by earl » Sun, Nov 22, 2009, 8:53 AM UTC

utnick wrote: post #14

can someone who knows explain what SAS is and why it is useful( without buzzwords ) Is it a scripting language that deals with data? How is it better than SQL?

SAS is a couple things.

The origin is a stats system. For a long time, they were the only stats package in town that was good at working on data that was larger than available memory. This is still mostly true, but people's definition of large data has outrun what even SAS can offer and people are falling back on MR frameworks.

They make their money with BI. It's a language, database system, ETL, and set of premade programs that are all about BI and analytics. They have stuff built out for large clients, so if you are eg a university or a large manufacturing concern or a bank or an ibank or a casino, etc, there are large bodies of preexisting functionality.