NOTE: SAS Global Forum 2013 Feedback #sasgf13

I just completed the conference survey. Overall I had a good conference - nobody booed during either of my papers, so that's a positive outcome! I liked the conference city (San Francisco), the conference venue was relatively compact (avoiding long walks between papers), I attended a number of well-presented papers, I learned useful stuff about current releases of SAS plus additional stuff about forthcoming SAS releases and how to plan for them.

I tried to offer some constructive feedback in my survey. Here's what I wrote. What do you think? Did your experiences match (or diverge)?

• I was very disappointed to see the loss of the Closing Session. It felt like the conference just petered-out. There was no opportunity to say "thank you" to organisers and volunteers, and no recognition for presenters (best paper??). A big shame


• I was greatly disappointed with the conference wi-fi. Even stood in one place it still seemed to come-and-go, and required a fresh login every time the signal was lost. As an overseas attendee (with very expensive data rates because I was roaming) I relied on conference wi-fi to keep in touch with emails, etc. The wi-fi caused me huge frustration


• I'd like a few more papers on general software development best practice, e.g. requirement, design and testing. It's great to learn about the technology and the language(s), but my clients' investments are wasted if they don't build stuff effectively and efficiently. So, I don't mean papers about syntax, I mean advice, recommendations and experience about the operation of a SAS development and support team


• I liked the conference's Android app. Hopefully it'll be a bit more "finished" next year, e.g. maps of the venue included in the app rather than requiring an internet connection to access them (see my comments re: conference wi-fi above). The ability to search for papers by name-of-author would be appreciated. An ability to filter My Agenda would be much appreciated because it involved a lot of scrolling to see my plans for Wednesday (having to scroll past Sunday, Monday and Tuesday to see Wednesday)


• I enjoyed the keynotes from Billy Beane and Roger Craig. Both were eloquent and amusing speakers, but both were talking about analytics and hence there was a strong tie-in with the conference.

Organising a conference is a demanding task. Organising an international conference for 4,200 attendees must be a mammoth task. My list of "enhancement opportunities" is miniscule when viewed in the context of the conference's organisers achievements. But there's no harm in trying to make next year's even better!

NOTE: Editing SAS #sasgf13

I don't get to write many SAS programs these days,  less still Base SAS code. However, I couldn't help but be impressed by the Macumba editor that was described and demonstrated by Michael Weisz of Bayer Pharma yesterday at SAS Global Forum. Sadly, it is not commercially available. The ability to do DATA step debugging  *and* macro debugging blew me away.

NOTE: SGF Technology Connection #sasgf13

Now that this morning's Technology Connection plenary session is over (see it yourself at http://www.livestream.com/sasglobalforum), I have a much clearer picture of the range of new developments that SAS are introducing with v9.4 across 2013 (yes, not all of the following will be available in June when v9.4 launches).

With regard to cloud, SAS supports all but two of the characteristics, service models and deployment models categorised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/cloud-102511.cfm). SAS have done a lot of work to create itegration and simplification of administration in this area. The new SAS App Centra web interface offers users and administrators a single start point for their daily activities. For users, they see alerts from administrators, buttons to launch their apps, news and useful links. When launching an app, users will be grateful for the new single signon capability that SAS have incorporated.

For administrators, SAS App Central provides the ability to define alerts (down time, upgrades, etc.), manage users, and manage environments & instances. With regard to instances, we're talking about internally hosted VMs plus off-premise hosted options including the likes of Amazon and Rachspace. The ability to keep different instances in sync with each others' software versioning, etc is incorporated. SAS recently acquired Rpath (http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-acquires-rpath-assets-to-boost-cloud/240143015) to bolster their ability to deliver in this area.

SAS App Works provides the ability to define and deploy apps to SAS App Central. Creation of  apps with relative paths is fully supported in order to ease migration and promotion through separate environments.

In the area of business visualisation, Visual Analytics is the poster child for SAS. Now at version 6.2,  SAS are maintaining a fast pace of development, incorporating more and more statistics and analytics techniques and presentation techniques.

For decision management, SAS have the new Decision Manager which provides the ability to create and then analyse decision flows. The Business Rule Manager is also new, introduced in December 2012.

In Data Management, we saw demonsration of capabilities for creating and workflowing a data remediation queue and the management of the lifecycle of data. As with administration, the Data Management Console unifies and integrates capability (some new, some old).

Finally, high performance analytics procedures (PROC HPxxxx) will be shipped as stadard components of SAS/STAT, SAS/ETS, Enterprise Miner, etc. As their names suggest, these PROCs offer high performnce tht is calable and requires no code change as your SAS architecture chnages and introduces new capabilities that the PROCs can make use of and thereby increase performmance and reduce run times.

So, the Technology Connection offered plenty of headlines that interested me, are of relevance to my clients and that I shall be investigating further. Plus, I'll be trawling the demo and sponsor area to see what's new with 3rd party suppliers such as Futrix and Metacoda. So much to do, so little in which to do it! SAS Global Forum 2013 is looking terrific already.

NOTE: SAS Global Forum Day #1 #sasgf13

It's Monday morning at SAS Global Forum; the conference gets into gear today. Yesterday evening the 4,000 attendees in San Fancisco attended the Opening Session and heard SAS senior staff describe the key topics for the event. All were centred around the phrase: strength in numbers.

It was the first Opening Session I've seen in many years that featured so much statistical capability of SAS software. Clearly, SAS see their strength as being able to take "big data" and not just do pretty graphs and animated pie charts but to do real industrial strength statistical analysis and predictive analytics and to help their customers influence their own future rather than simple draw graphs of the past.

There wasn't a great deal of novel technical content yesterday evening but Jim Goodnight did mention that v9.4 will be available n June 2013 and its architecture is geared towards the cloud (whether it be internal virtual machines, or true off-premise hosting). And, SAS will soon be making a web-based version of Display Manager available. The whole Opening Session was broadcast live on the internet and is now available to watch at http://www.livestream.com/sasglobalforum.

On a personal note, I enjoyed a cycle ride with friends yesterday. We hired bikes from Blazing Saddles near Fishermans' Wharf, cycled across the Golden Gate bridge , had a fantastic lunch in Salito's in Sausalito (http://www.salitoscrabhouse.com), and got the ferry back to Fishermans' Wharf. It was a terrific way to get to see San Francisco from may angles, and  a terrific way to overcome any jet lag!

This morning, right now, I'm enjoying the keynote session with Billy Beane (ref: Moneyball, Oakland A's baseball team) and looking forward to the following Technology Connection that will reveal technical details that will influence my clients' decisions over the next year.

NOTE: Catching the SGF Agenda #sasgf13

I've never paid much attention to the SAS Global Forum (SGF) online agenda builder before. I've preferred the pen on paper approach, using the pull-out printed agenda in the conference programme. However, with the introduction of an Android version of the conference app this year, I can see the benefit of doing some planning and making life easier whilst at the conference.

So, I've just been through the whole agenda (yes, all 633 paper descriptions) and made a first cut of what I'd like to see or do. As a result I've filled my Twitter timeline with scores of tweets about my sessions choices - the agenda builder tweets every time you add a session to your agenda!

Inevitably I've double and triple booked myself, but I can iterate over my plans and make final decisions on the day. As always, there are some excellent topics and speakers. I won't be able to see all of them so I'll have to apply a degree of discipline to my choices. And I need to make sure I take time to make a good trawl of the demo area, speaking to the developers and product managers, and thereby getting information from the horses' mouths re: directions and futures for SAS products that are key to my clients.

This year I shall have a heightened interest in life sciences and clinical products, so SAS Drug Development (SDD), SAS Clinical Data Integration (CDI), and JMP Clinical are on my hit list.

So much to do, so little time in which to do it!

The good news is that I've already packed and so I'm ready to catch my flight tomorrow morning.

NOTE: In The Picture #sasgf13

While I'm packing for my trip to SAS Global Forum, I thought I'd share some San Francisco pictures with you.

There's a link at the end of this article.

They're by Trey Ratcliff, who almost shares a surname with me, and they cover a mixture of San Francisco scenes plus visits to tech companies in the region. The shot of "Alcatraz in the Dusk" (on page 3 of the San Francisco collection) is one of my favourites but I've chosen a classic view of the Golden Gate bridge to illustrate this article. Scoll down the page of Trey's shots and blog articles to see some wonderful work - including the Alcatraz shot.

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/category/travel/california/san-francisco/

They won't help you with SAS or software development, but I hope you like them.

Nice shots of London, my home city, too: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/category/travel/uk/london/