Starting with a new software and programming language is not easy. This tips and tricks helps you to understand the basics in SAS and how to access your data , sample data and help files in order to start in the good direction.

Base SAS contains couple of very nice procedures to create reports on your data . This tips and tricks shows you an overview of the most popular including The Proc Tabulate which is one of the most powerful SAS reporting Procedure.

Log files contains tons of useful information, they help you when you have syntax errors, warnings and notes but you could use your logs in order to monitor your daily processes and identify the potential bottlenecks.

Windows scheduler can be used to execute automatically SAS code at specific moment of the day or at specific days of the month. They execute the same code every time but, thanks to macro, the output result could change thanks to the environment (data, time, user (etc.).)

Gathering job statistics could help you to detect proactively problems in your data by comparing current values with their estimated values. The idea behind is to collect as much as possible information on your daily run processes (number of records, times it take, number of missing (etc.)) and store them in an historical table. If the values of the current run differs with the values of previous run for the same jobs, this could indicate potential problem.

Getting quickly metadata information on your datasets could be useful in some context of conditional execution of SAS programs (e.g.: Don't execute this step if empty dataset). Different methods exists to achieve that: using metadata functions, using Proc contents, or dictionary tables.

Using a SAS table to control job execution can be useful when lot of jobs have to be scheduled regularly but depending on circumstance some don't have to be scheduled. In normal situation we would have to adapt the job scheduler and this could be time consuming. You could use instead a SAS Dataset or Excel spreadsheet where all the jobs are listed with a flag variable indicating the list of jobs to schedule.

A Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) is a dimension that stores and manages both current and historical data over time in a data warehouse. It is considered and implemented as one of the most critical ETL tasks in tracking the history of dimension records. Different SCD strategies could be implemented and this tips and tricks is focused on SCD1 where records are updated no history is kept and SCD2 where history is kept,

SAS macro language allows you to process dynamically all the files of a directory or all the files of a library . Different technic exist depending on the nature of the files. This tips and tricks discuss the case when your files are datasets present in a single library and discuss the case when we manipulate flat files in a folder structure.

Indexes are special reference tables that the SAS engine can use to speed up data retrieval. Simply put, an index is a pointer to data in a table. In this tips and tricks we will discuss how you can create and use SAS indexes.