SAS Enterprise Guide is hard to describe, difficult to pigeonhole, a very powerful tool that is the “Excel” of SAS, and the closest thing there is to an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for SAS. Since the release of SAS 9, Enterprise Guide is the new face of SAS for general purpose use in a variety of situations. Enterprise Guide is now included with desktop SAS for Windows, sold with almost every BI Server sale, bundled with many of the SAS Solutions, and loved by users at many companies I have visited. It does have shortcomings, but it is capable of a breadth of work that no other tool is capable of performing (at least that I have ever seen!) Simply stated, it leverages many of the old and new strengths of SAS in an easy to use desktop application.
I will venture to offer a brief overview of the capabilities with SAS Enterprise Guide:
1) Easy access to import data from almost any source accessible via your PC: Excel, Access, CSV, ODBC, OLE DB, and even Exchange mailbox data can be imported to SAS with a few simple clicks in Enterprise Guide.
2) Enterprise Guide provides users with very powerful data management capabilities. Frequently used data management capabilities include a sophisticated query builder, data sampling, ranking, transposing, and even creating and editing data. I have seen many customers use Enterprise Guide as a “poor person’s” data warehousing toolbox, but I typically discourage such practices. I do encourage the use of Enterprise Guide as a data staging ground for reporting and analytics. SAS also encourages this by bundling it with Enterprise Miner (it also can access scoring models from Enterprise Miner, but that falls under analytics below!)
3) Data reporting was the weakest link in Enterprise Guide prior to SAS 9 and EG 4.1. However, EG now leverages the new SAS Report Model and has some pretty nice capabilities in the report authoring area. Reporting tasks can vary from simple listings, data summaries, and sophisticated pivot table like functionality via the Summary Tables task. More important, with EG 4.1 you can format reports via a point and click interface and maintain all of your formatting when you rerun the project at a later time. Finally, you can combine multiple pieces of your project output (graphs, summary tables, and analytics) into one report and publish it for use on the web or in Microsoft Office!
4) Graphics- while SAS has many basic and sophisticated graphics available to users, it was traditionally very difficult to get what you wanted without wading through a thousand page manual. Graphs that I used to spend hours or days writing in SAS code can now be made in minutes with Enterprise Guide. Every chart comes with a multitude of options to tweak it just so. A new experimental download with EG 4.1 add the ability to create and explore data interactively through charts. While not as sophisticated as products like Tableau, it has the advantage of accessing and aggregating the data on the SAS Server, allowing this experimental task to use millions or even billions of rows of data as the input to the charts.
5) Analytics- point and click your way through basic statistics like t-tests, regression, and correlation to advanced methods for forecasting, quality control, and data mining. Most of these tasks also bundle in nice diagnostic graphs to understand the analysis and present it to non-technical audiences. Logistic regression in EG is a poor persons data mining (notice a trend here?) but Enterprise Miner is the complete package when it comes to data mining. Forecasting in EG is very useful and powerful, but SAS Forecast Server is the complete package (and it integrates very nicely with Microsoft Office via the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.)
6) SAS Programming- if you are an experienced SAS programmer, you can combine the power of your experience with the point and click capabilities of EG in areas that you might be unfamiliar with. In fact, you can use EG and never access the wizards provided in it, but why would you limit yourself? I have often said that becoming an expert at SAS programming takes around 5 years, but mastering EG takes about 1-2 years. More important, EG allows new programmers to learn the SAS syntax to complex areas (like graphs and procedures like Mixed) in short order. Programming in SAS continues to be relevant, but focuses on advanced areas like data step, macros, and data access optimization.
I have personally visited many large companies that have a similar story of Enterprise Guide adoption and widespread growth of SAS usage. In the “old days”, with just a handful of SAS programmers, SAS was perceived as the province of the SAS “priesthood.” Since it is hard to find and/or train SAS programmers, someone brought in Enterprise Guide typically for people experienced with Excel or competitor’s business intelligence tools- such as Brio, Cognos, or Crystal Reports.
These people were frequently seeking more power than their tools provided, but wanted a quick learning curve- faster than the path to becoming an expert SAS programmer. After a year or two of SAS and Enterprise Guide, other business teams were very interested in accessing the power of SAS, so they would add Enterprise Guide to their team. Eventually, someone would buy the BI Server to get their Excel or PowerPoint junkies connected with SAS via the Add-In for Microsoft Office. Work in EG can be easily published to these Add-In for Microsoft Office users. In just a few years the number of SAS users would skyrocket from 10 or 20 to 500 or even 5,000!
More Joy of Enterprise Guide is forthcoming in part 2… 
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Tags: Articles · SAS · Tools4 Comments
Posted on September 26th, 2007 by
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EG is crap. It takes to long to run and it is an insult to experienced SAS programmers. Furthermore it is crap to develop code with loops and so on. If you make a tiny mistake and it runs infinite, you cannot stop it with the stop button anywhere. You have to abort it with task manger and try it new. If you missed out saving it, you even need to remember the whole code. I would not mind its exisence. Its great for non programmers. They just need to click click and they can call themself as programmers. But then the experienced programmer need to fix their mess they made. And convincing the management just istalling EG and force everyone to use it is horrendous. Management normally do not have technical skills, so they would not even notice the difference.
Bundling it wit Enterprise Miner is just a taktic like buy one get 2. Nobody I work with is actually using it.
Hi Sabrina,
Thanks for your thoughts. Let me attempt to summarize and reply to your
concerns:
1) EG has provided an experience that did not meet your initial
expectations. In fact, you have been underwhelmed relative to your
expectations.
2) EG takes a long time to run. EG is mainly a front-end to your SAS server,
latency is typically experienced for server start-up, large log files to
return and large output datasets to be returned. Also, upon closing projects with many datasets, there is a lag as EG determines how to clean up after the project.
That said, EG is not any slower than local or server SAS via direct
connection. Often people attribute slowness to EG that is frequently related to growth in users with the addition of EG or server processes that, of which they are unaware.
3) EG is an insult to experienced SAS programmers. I would strongly disagree with you. In fact, I would be happy to stack my SAS programming skills head-to-head with anyone in the SAS programming world. I have worked in many companies using SAS for hand-coded data warehouses, innumerable analytic data prep programs, simulation, non-standard statistical analysis (not available in PROC’s), macro library development, statistical programming, complex SAS GRAPHs, forecasting, old-school AF and FSP development and many other areas.
I have rummaged through almost every SAS v 6 and v 8 SAS manual at some point to solve various problems. I have personally spent time training at least 50-60 SAS programmers over the years and I understand the time needed to become proficient and expert at SAS programming, even in a small fraction of SAS traditional capabilities.
I only state all of this to show that I am a very experienced programmer and I have also taken the time to master EG. I can state emphatically that EG can replace 80% of the code I have ever written and in much less time than I could write it.
I once met with an author of many SAS books and he said something similar to your statement. This is a person for whom I have great respect. I respectfully told them they were wrong and I wanted the chance to show them.
They pulled one of their books off the shelf and opened to a problem in the
middle, stating “EG can’t do this!” I asked how long it would take them, as
the author of this book, to write the code at the moment. They said around 5 minutes. I then asked for the data and opened EG. I solved the problem in the book in around 2 minutes.
They were incredulous and opened another example from another book. Same question, they stated they could do it in 3 or 4 minutes. I solved it about 2 minutes with EG.
Having said all of this, there are many times that I work with EG projects to
radically clean them up- both in verbosity and in efficiency. However, I was
able to explore multiple analysis paths with EG in a much shorter time than
writing all code from scratch.
4) “If you make a tiny mistake and it runs infinite, you cannot stop it with
the stop button anywhere. You have to abort it with task manger and try it
new.”
This is a weakness, but one of how the 1st generation SAS client-server
architecture behaves, but appears to users as an EG shortcoming. This has been addressed in SAS 9.2 and was somewhat better in EG 4.1/SAS 9.1.3.
5) “If you missed out saving it, you even need to remember the whole code.”
I agree; I save religiously using simple version numbers and cleaning up
afterwards. EG 4.2 has a new auto-save project feature.
6) “I would not mind its exisence. It’s great for non programmers.”
I agree, in fact this is why it was initially created. Why should someone
need to learn SAS programming to create a report, run a regression, etc.? In fact, this has been a big savior for SAS in my many visits to SAS customers. To be blunt, SAS wouldn’t be in 20-30% of all companies without it and I think this is a low estimate. Strong SAS programmers, while very valuable, are very hard to find and are typically bored working in a business group. They need a central team of comrades to be happy and have variety in their work. EG often allows these central teams to even exist and to offload mundane projects into the business.
7) “They just need to click click and they can call themself as programmers.
But then the experienced programmer needs to fix their mess they made.”
I have yet to meet an EG jockey that thought they were a “programmer”. They usually call themselves an “analyst” or something similar. That said, I think solid, personable programmers could immensely help heavy EG users with learning good data management practices, understanding how macros could be wrapped around EG projects, etc. You as the expert programmer are presumably an expert to enable business success, spending 10-15% of your time educating the masses of casual users will likely yield very large returns in my experience.
Also, many EG analysts would be horrible programmers, but they are often much better analysts than many SAS programmers in my experience. Why? Because they understand the subject matter of the data being analyzed and they can communicate the results in an actionable manner to the business owners. This is why you see very few “SAS Programmer” jobs in lines of business, because they are very focused on the details necessary for strong programming and not focused enough on the business needs and finding rapid answers to them.
Nobody I work with is actually using it.
I know the people who manage EM development and the rationale for adding EG was nothing like your statement. It really boiled down to the need for analytic data prep, plain and simple. If you have EM, you can totally avoid EG with Code Nodes if you prefer, but I would say you are overlooking a valuable tool for rapidly building analytic datasets. Also, there are many GRAPH and STAT PROCs that are very complex to write that EG can save you tremendous amounts of time to create, just like the EM point and click. I have used EM combined with EG at several companies and think it is the best data mining toolkit anywhere, if money is no object.
All the best,
Stephen McDaniel
HI, I read your comments on EG with interest. It is a great tool, but when thye server is remote it takes so long to open wide datasets that I find it almost unusable – have you not had this problem? Eg a data set with 100 columns with a numeric “1″ in each takes 18 second to opne and as much to scroll down. Everything else works fine (eg scrolling though logs). Or have I got something set wrong?
joe
[...] Guide (which I never figured out in the twenty minutes I spent on it), I came across this Freakalytics blog on The Joy of SAS Enterprise Guide. While I agreed with most of his points, one point made by a dissenter in the comment section I [...]