What Is SAS?

SAS is a language and software suite for working with data: reading it, cleaning it, summarizing it, running statistics on it, and producing reports. The name originally stood for "Statistical Analysis System". It grew out of a project at North Carolina State University, and SAS Institute, the company that makes it, was founded in 1976.

proc means data=sashelp.class maxdec=1;
   var height weight;
run;

                The MEANS Procedure

Variable     N         Mean      Std Dev      Minimum      Maximum
------------------------------------------------------------------
Height      19         62.3          5.1         51.3         72.0
Weight      19        100.0         22.8         50.5        150.0
------------------------------------------------------------------

Four lines of code computed summary statistics for a sample data set of 19 students that ships with every SAS installation. That is SAS in a nutshell.

A SAS program is made of two kinds of building blocks:

• DATA steps — code you write to read, create, and change data sets (SAS's tables), one row at a time.
• PROC steps — ready-made procedures that do a job for you: print, sort, summarize, count, run a regression, draw a chart.

Its defining traits:

• Data sets first — everything revolves around rectangular tables of rows (observations) and columns (variables).
• Hundreds of procedures — decades of tested, documented statistical methods, all called the same way.
• Handles big data on modest hardware — SAS reads data sets from disk row by row, so tables don't need to fit in memory.
• Commercial — SAS is licensed software, but it's free for learning through SAS OnDemand for Academics.

This course teaches SAS 9.4 programming (the language used in SAS Studio, SAS OnDemand for Academics, and SAS Viya's compute server), with a look at SAS Viya in Level 3.

How the examples were checked: SAS can't be installed for free on a personal computer, so the examples in this course were written and reviewed carefully against the SAS documentation, not executed. Output is shown as simplified plain-text tables — the style of SAS's classic "listing" output. SAS Studio shows the same numbers as HTML tables.