What's in Your (SAS) Wallet?

SAS Programming Professionals,


With tip of the hat to Capital One's famous ad campaign, I want to ask you:  What's in your SAS installation?


That is an important question because it is the key to knowing which SAS sub-products you can bring to bear on your organization's many business problems and analysis tasks.  Besides Base (Core) SAS, do you have SAS/GRAPH, or SAS/STAT, or SAS/OR, or SAS/IML, or SAS/Access Interface to PC File Formats installed on your workstation?  Do you have SAS products in addition to the aforementioned which you could exploit in certain circumstances to characterize corporate data and create result sets for your clients--be they internal or external clients?


Many SAS professionals think the best way to determine which SAS products are installed is to simply run PROC SETINIT, like this:


PROC SETINIT;
RUN;


Well, that is certainly a good start, but it does not give them the entire picture.  PROC SETINIT reveals all of the SAS products licensed for the platform it is running on.  It is possible that the SAS administrator did not actually install all of the products that are in the license on the computer.  If you did the SAS installation yourself, it is possible that you did not check off all of the available products when performing the install.  So, there may be a disparity between the number of products licensed and the number of products actually installed.


A better way to get this information is to run PROC PRODUCT_STATUS, like this:


PROC PRODUCT_STATUS;
RUN;


PROC PRODUCT_STATUS creates a very nifty report which specifies the SAS products installed on your computer as well as the maintenance level of each product.  The products listed in the log as a result of running this procedure are the only products that you can run with SAS on your computer.


If you are curious as to whether you have additional SAS products available on your license than are installed, run both PROC SETINIT and PROC PRODUCT_STATUS and then compare the two reports.  If you are not happy with what you see, have that long, serious talk with your SAS administrator and ask that the additional products you need be installed. 


Armed with PROC PRODUCT_STATUS, you will never come up short when somebody stops you in the hall and asks you: What's in your SAS installation?


Best  of luck in all your SAS endeavors!


----MMMMIIIIKKKKEEEE
(aka Michael A. Raithel)
Author page: http://www.amazon.com/Michael-A.-Raithel/e/B001K8GG90/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0