NOTE: SGF 2012 Early-Bird Registration Ends March 19th

If you haven't already registered for SAS Global Forum 2012 (SGF) you need to hurry-up because the early-bird discounts will end on March 19th.

If you're not convinced of the value of attending, check-out last year's best contributed papers to see the quality and breadth of what's on offer. That's without taking account of the demo area and the ability to network with colleagues and peers.

NOTE: B&D to be Acquired by Sopra

One of the UK's largest independant providers of SAS skills, Business & Decision UK, is to be acquired by the Sopra Group. Jointly announced with the same press release (B&D, Sopra) on the 13th February, the transaction is expected to be completed in the next few weeks, subject to regulatory conditions.

You may be able to remember SPS, one of the very first UK-based SAS consultancies, established by Peter Bailey. B&D, headquartered in France, acquired SPS some time ago. Whilst the likes of Amadeus and Base3 continue to provide focused SAS services in the UK, it seems that the trend is towards larger suppliers with a broader base of technology and integration skills. What do you think?

Sopra Group is also headquartered in France. It's results for 2011 show revenue of 1bn euros, 13,000 staff and a focus on IT services and software development.

NOTE: Hot Fix Home

A recent upgrade from SAS 9.1 to 9.2 necessitated an upgrade from Enterprise Guide (and Add-In for Microsoft Office) 4.1 to 4.3 for one of my clients. Disappointingly, the EG and Add-In upgrades didn't prove to be the smoothest, and the experience was painful for a significant number of users. Top issues were a) poor migration of EG projects, resulting in users having to re-write some of their projects, and b) Excel freezing when the Add-In was used and the session was left for 15 minutes or so.

As a result of the foregoing, I took more than the usual amount of interest in hot fixes. My usual approach to hot fixes is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", i.e. I only recommend the application of hot fixes if there's a specific issue to fix.

If you have an interest in hot fixes, the SAS Hot Fix Home is an excellent one-stop-shop for this information in the SAS Support web site. From there, you can choose your version (in the left-hand column), and then select "All SAS 9.x Products" to find a comprehensive list of SAS products with hyper-links to hot fixes for those individual products.

We're now running EG and Add-In with hot fix 20; our users are much happier.

Contrary to the experience with the SAS clients, the deployment of SAS 9.2 Grid has been pain-free and the users have no complaints about performance or reliability/availability. My clients have a robust, scalable SAS service.

NOTE: Enterprise Guide 5.1 - Now Shipping!

If you haven't already picked-up the news from elsewhere, I should tell you that Enterprise Guide 5.1 (EG 5.1) started shipping earlier this month. For SAS 9.2 and 9.3 only* at this point in time, EG 5.1 looks like it adds some decent new functionality. I'll be keen to see it running at SAS Global Forum 2012 in a few weeks.

The What's New guide lists many new features. The ones that caught my eye were:

• Improved grid support plus support for parallel execution of tasks. I shall be interested to see the degree of WORK library sharing between grid/parallel activity. This has been a weakness in out-of-the-box versions of EG to-date
• Ability to export your output as an xlsx file (for use in Microsoft Excel 2007+)
• For programmers, EG 5.1 offers additional autocomplete information (for data set names and data set column names)
• Sundry enhancements to Query Builder and OLAP Analyser
• Available as a 64-bit version, in addition to a 32-bit version

There's also an intriguing new tool called the Data Explorer. This apparently allows users to create views of their data with specific columns plus sorting and filtering. It sounds remarkably like the existing Filter and Sort task, so I'll be interested to understand the distinction between the two.

I hope to get my hands on a copy soon!

*I had understood that EG 5.1 was only available for SAS 9.3, but the EG 5.1 section of the What's New guide explicitly states "You can run SAS Enterprise Guide on either a SAS 9.2 or SAS 9.3 server."

NOTE: Code Kata #1 Follow-Up

A few weeks ago I published the first in an irregular series of code katas. In a previous post I had described code katas as a form of training for programmers.

I saw a lot of interest around the post.

Richard Koopman posted an elegant response on his blog, including an additional solution for US coinage. His solution was neat, making good use of arrays and iterative coding, but my attention was also caught by Richard's home-made phone stand for his iPhone. Nice work Richard.

My old friend Dave Booth emailed me a solution that he had written off the top of his head, with no access to SAS at the time. It worked. I was suitably impressed. Dave's solution, like Richard's, used what Dave describes as a greedy algorithm. This is a very descriptive name and the Wikipedia entry offers the "coin change" challenge as an example. Dave also made a good point about handling errors elagantly:

Putting something in the code to try to trap unforeseen outcomes is a good habit to get into.

I agree, and code katas are a good opportunity to practice error trapping strategies.

Finally, Dave drew my attention to an excellent source of puzzles that could form code katas: ProjectEuler.net. The site offers a series of challenges that require a mixture of mathematical and computer science skills to solve. Take a look at the list of challenges and you'll see some good starting problems such as "Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5".

In summary, don't wait for me to post more code katas. There are plenty out there on the web, and they all offer great opportunities for you to improve your coding skills.

"The Delegator" - Positive or Negative Epithet?

In a recent meeting, an action arose and I asked one of my team (PJ) to catch it and complete it. He (tongue in cheek) commented to all those at the meeting that I was "the best delegator" he'd ever worked with. His humorous implication was that I don't do any work, I just get other people to do it for me. I've known PJ for years and worked on many successful projects with him, so I was happy to be the butt of his joke. However, I see delegation is a positive thing, so it set me thinking about how different people understand the verb "delegate".

The dictionary says it means "to give a particular job, duty, right, etc. to someone else so that they do it for you". The fact that one is giving one's work to somebody else to do doesn't sound altogether positive, but if we accept that a team can do more work than one individual, and if we accept that a team needs a leader to coordinate and dispatch work around the team, then the team leader isn't delegating his/her own work, they are simply spreading the team's work around the members of the team.

However, in my mind, delegation is a tool to help the team learn and grow. And that means that I choose to delegate some of the management work to members of the team also. By doing so, I can coach them to learn new skills; and I inevitably learn new things as we go along too.

Not everyone wants to be a manager, but everybody needs to understand the objectives and challenges of management. Armed with knowledge of management, one can work in harmony with one's leaders and management. Moreover, it is often the case that the perception of the team leader's role is not a match for the actuality. For me, team leadership is about a) achieving more than I can manage on my own, b challenging myself and my team to do new things, c) helping my team members to become the best they can become, d) learning from others, e) enjoying the benefits of being part of a successful team.

So, "The Delegator", is it a positive or a negative epithet? In my mind it is a distinctively positive name. It means I'm helping my team to learn and grow, and I'm helping them with their career and their ability to enjoy their working days (and at the same time they are helping me to do the same).