{"id":2546,"date":"2012-07-24T00:55:25","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T05:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=2546"},"modified":"2012-07-24T01:24:01","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T06:24:01","slug":"sas-on-demand-needs-you-to-be-reasonable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/sas-on-demand-needs-you-to-be-reasonable\/","title":{"rendered":"SAS On-Demand Needs You to be Reasonable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tried reading in a file with 360,000+ records times 279 variables with SAS On-Demand using SAS Enterprise Guide. It was on one of my office computers that has a pretty slow Internet connection. I was using a different computer at the time so I just let it run. After 29 minutes, I gave up, did it on SAS Enterprise Guide installed on a laptop and it was done in a minute or less.<\/p>\n

Lesson learned: Don’t try running huge files on SAS On-Demand<\/p>\n

The positive side is once I reduced that file to the subset of 8,000 records and 20 variables that I needed, everything ran perfectly on SAS On-Demand.<\/p>\n

Really, that’s not unreasonable performance. If you are doing a project for a class, you probably are not going to have an enormous data set in either length or width. For anything of reasonable size – and 8,000 records is pretty good size for a class project – SAS On-Demand works pretty well.<\/p>\n

However, I have never been accused of being a reasonable person and the first thing I think when I get any new piece of software is to try to break it. As my grandmother said, this is why you cannot have nice things.<\/p>\n

I’m in North Carolina the next few days for a class on predictive modeling with SAS Enterprise Miner. I thought I would brush up on it a bit before class, so I tried to install it on boot camp on my Mac desktop.<\/p>\n

First problem occurred when I tried to update Java on my desktop. Instead of updating the version of Java I had, somehow I ended up with two different versions of Java installed. When I tried to get SAS On-Demand with Enterprise Miner to work by clicking on the link from the SAS On-Demand page, nothing.<\/p>\n

I thought perhaps I should not have two versions of Java, so I uninstalled the newer version I had just installed and tried again. This time I got a small file downloaded named MAIN. I was expecting that. I double-clicked on it a window popped up that said Java Web Start and said it was downloading and verifying the application Enterprise Miner 7.1<\/p>\n

This went on for about 15 minutes and Enterprise Miner never started up. I cancelled it, deleted the other version of Java, and downloaded the very latest version and tried again. Same thing happened. Actually I did not expect the version of Java was the problem but I figured I may as well update to the latest shiny thing while I was at it.<\/p>\n

I am pretty certain that the problem is the internet connection is pathetically slow. It seriously reminds me of the days when the only way I could get an internet connection in North Dakota was through dialing up (anyone remember dial-up?) on CompuServe or AOL. I’m not exaggerating.<\/p>\n

So … I moved to a different spot in the hotel where (according to Windows 7) my connection strength is now “excellent”. \u00a0Bingo! Enterprise Miner.<\/p>\n

It’s still kind of slow, but it is working.<\/p>\n

I’ll be at a different hotel tomorrow (my life story) and try the connection there and again when I get back home. Microsoft and I have different ideas of the speed that should be identified as “excellent”. Apparently, Enterprise Miner agrees with me.<\/p>\n

You might think this would deter me from using SAS On-Demand in my course. It may not, though. The course I am considering using it for is an on-line course and I would be doing the demos from my desktop that has an ethernet connection. I THINK the speed will be okay.<\/p>\n

It may be a little slow when the students use it on their own home networks but they are getting a mega-expensive piece of software for free, so they need to be a little reasonable.<\/p>\n

(I am a big hypocrite here because I have the patience of an infant.)<\/p>\n

Really, though, when you finally get it working, SAS Enterprise Miner is pretty cool.<\/p>\n

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Tried reading in a file with 360,000+ records times 279 variables with SAS On-Demand using SAS Enterprise Guide. It was on one of my office computers that has a pretty slow Internet connection. I was using a different computer at the time so I just let it run. After 29 minutes, I gave up, did…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2546"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2549,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions\/2549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}