Serving SAS to other systems

SAS is known for its ability to conduct ETL protocols on very large datasets. While other products have this capability, SAS also has the ability to conduct advanced statistical analyses, such as regressions. When compared to data warehouse storage software from other companies, such as Oracle's SQL, SAS is superior when it comes to the capacity to perform analytic functions. Even creating a contingency table such as the one produced by PROC FREQ can be overwhelming in terms of processing effort when attempted by other data warehouse software.

However, even though SAS has evolved over time, the continued difficulty in programming efficient I/O in SAS through the sophisticated use of data step language continues to hamper SAS when it competes with other products. This is why, traditionally, SAS data warehouses were only constructed to serve analysts who were planning on analyzing the data using SAS as the analytic software. That way, the only I/O...