 So, hello, everybody. Welcome to our lecture today. I'm Monica Wahee, and I think of myself as a SAS expert. I wrote a book about SAS, and I've been using SAS off and on for about 20 years. Today, we're going to talk about why SAS Enterprise Guide might be your key to data integration. So, I'm going to assume everybody showing up here is a SAS user and has at least a basic background in SAS, and so you know that there are different components to SAS. And SAS Enterprise Guide is one of those components, and it's a component that you may have never heard of. It matters whether your SAS shop uses it, and it's one that's been around since the 1990s. So, it's a very interesting component. If you haven't used it, you could be using it, so that's what I wanted to talk about today. But before we get into it, I wanted to let you know I'm holding a free online workshop. It's called Application Basics for SAS Integration. It's based on an actual online course called Application Basics. And it's really intended for people who have degrees in data analysis and do data analysis who did not get those degrees from a business school to fill in the information they need to know about applications. Now, what's special about this workshop is we're going to be using the online course, but I'm going to be teaching it about SAS, talking about SAS integration with applications, not just applications, so it's got a SAS spin on it. So, please notice that the workshop is in three sessions, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, August 7, August 9, August 11. It's about two to three hours each depending on how many people show up. And then you have a private wrap-up session with me. It's all free, so please go to the event on LinkedIn. There's a link there to a registration form that you can sign up if you want to be in the free workshop, and I hope to see you there. All right, so now back to the regularly scheduled program, which is SAS Enterprise Guide. So it was invented in the 90s, and some SAS shops adopted it, and some did not. Okay, and so you're probably wondering, well, why did anybody adopt it? Well, as you'll see as I explained it, it was really a great way to start automating your SAS back in the 90s. So normally how people would run SAS when they are doing it repeatedly, like I did when I worked at this data lake at the US Army. We just kind of ran it each time we loaded data. We were very manual about it. And that can work if you're not loading data very often, but if you're doing it all the time, you really want to automate it. And so I think it's probably the shops that were automating these things that were the first ones to adopt SAS Enterprise Guide, and they love it. Okay, so those who adopted it back in the 90s, especially really loved it. But I literally didn't hear of it until like 10 years ago, literally, because one of the learners I was working with, who is was at a college, they actually had access to this Enterprise Guide. And it was, it's a really cool tool, but there's some caveats. So today we're going to, and that's exactly why this lecture is we're going to talk about the use case for SAS Enterprise Guide and data integration in SAS because it can be used for different things, but that's what I'm sort of into. So what is actually SAS Enterprise Guide? So if you want like a really good white paper on it, go to this white paper. And the reason why the little cat emoji is Sunil Gupta is awesome colleague. He was one of the editors of my SAS book. That's how I actually met him. And I read his white paper. He's just the coolest guy. He's got a lot of training materials out there. He does a lot in R also. So he's just cool guy to know. So what is SAS Enterprise Guide? It's actually an interface. And it versions separately from SAS base instead. So you know how like we have SAS Viya now? That version separately from SAS. So this is this is a whole different application kind of in SAS that you could install. Okay. And when you see it, like I'll show you actually I made a diagram because I didn't want to steal anybody screenshot, but you'll see it looks sort of Windows XPE. Okay. And it helps you manage your code and set up data pipelines and run tasks in a more automated way. And what would happen is programmers either adopted Enterprise Guide and then now they use it all the time. Or if you have not used it, you'll you'll find it awkward. You first try to use it. Okay. Trust me, I was totally awkward with this learner. And what you realize is Enterprise Guide is something if you have a shop where you're doing a lot of regular things, not clinical research, because usually do things like what's like you fit this model. But when you're like running a data warehouse or you're regularly cleaning some data or merging mailing lists or doing fraud detection or something like that, like running regular jobs on something. Then you want to think about Enterprise Guide because you've already got a shop then that's really pretty well organized. Right. So this is SAS Enterprise Guide for just using SAS. Okay. So if you're not trying to integrate anything, look at how complicated this task list is. This is from Sunil's paper. Right. So if you can see this, see I told you it looks sort of Windows XPE. What you have to imagine is there's sort of this panel and you can drag these out you can drag out a factor analysis. You can drag out this prod freak over here this one way frequency. You can set them up as tasks. So for example, one of the things we would do at the Army is like, if we created a variable like let's say we created age group from age. We'd run a two way frequency that with list missing because we wanted to see if we recorded everything right. And so that could be like a job that I could set up that automatically runs after that. And so it lets you set up this jobs run in order. So what I was thinking is when I was at, I didn't even know about Enterprise Guide until after I left my army job. But if I didn't know about it at the Army, maybe I could I could have explored installing it. And then what we would have done is taken like we just had code that was sort of an order like we named it 105 and then some what it did, and then 110 and then what it did and so we knew to run it in order. Well, that's what we first did and then I was like we need to make these into macros. So we made them into macros and we started just managing the macros but then we would launch the macros from this code, because some macros you'd launch for some years and not other years in the warehouse. Now, because we were so organized. I could have installed Enterprise Guide and actually automated all that code because we had already read that. So this is my long way of saying you have to be that organized and you have to be at that point before you can really use Enterprise Guide. So, this is one of the functions that Enterprise Guide does is it can help you write reports and proc tab I thought this was really cool. This is from Sunil's paper. So, what you'll you can do is you're connected maybe I should go back one you're connected to data stores or it doesn't show it here. You can connect to data stores. And then you can do some sort of dragging around to create this remember how hard it is to use to program straight proc tab. So you can see below this that SAS Enterprise Guide is writing the proc tab for you it's ugly code, like out equals sass user dot table. 8157 8157 that's, or tab 8157 that's how much work Sunil does. But anyway, so it's going to write ugly code, but it really gets you there like it would take me forever to figure out how to do that in proc tab I just admit it. So, the white paper by Sunil really focuses on using Enterprise Guide for report pipelines because remember, SAS has been implemented, like a lot of SAS programming has gone into automated reports like, like their headers and footers and stuff. The way Enterprise Guide works is if you are in for any in for a pound so let's pretend I go back to my data lake. We had all this neat code. Everything was in tasks that I could have just implemented. Let's say I had installed Enterprise Guide, we'd implemented that and all of those tasks we built all of this and now we could do with this proc tab and the fly we could do all that. We're kind of stuck with SAS then you know we really can't migrate away from SAS after we do that like that is a lot of work. And so then the question is, like if you, if you already have a SAS shop with Enterprise Guide in it. That's the kind of SAS shop to use to see if you can do data integration. Okay. Of course your data integration is going to work like like Sunil showing here is more reporting. What I did was more data integration but it will work better with a bunch of SAS data sets not ones from like SQL or you can read in CSVs it can be that you're reading in raw data we were doing a lot of that. Again, it's like if you already have Enterprise Guide at your workplace and it's being used, keep using it. But if you implemented now you're sort of marrying SAS, right. I wanted to show you the interface an example of an interface for Enterprise Guide. I made this diagram this is from my book. You have to use your imagination. This is real code I just took a screenshot here this is real output I put a screenshot here. You can see these tasks, and then also up here you'll see, like this process flow. This is where, like you really have to be a designer and here here is see these objects. This is my representation to you of how you would be dragging these objects out and configuring them. Again, you have to have all this design, and often I even just have a diagram like a PowerPoint that I already have before I go build something like this. I want to help that learner like 2016. I just spent a half hour being baffled by this interface. So that's another problem like you're going to have to learn how to use the and see all these windows here. These windows you can put them there you can remove them it's, you can really customize your interface. So you really have to know what you're doing and so the fact that Sunil wrote that white paper, I can tell he does a lot of reporting and he got it really going well for reporting. So it has a lot of functionality for organizing multiple tasks. And you can also you'll notice on my first lecture of the series was on SAS access, which is a way component that allows you to make an ODBC connection, basically from inside SAS, even like on PC SAS and go out and connect to a SQL database if you have permission, or another kind of database but you can connect to a SQL is the one I would use, and then get the data to come in. You can do that in SAS Enterprise God that's you just make it one of your tasks. And so that's how you would do the data integration, for example, but I see people where I've seen enterprise Godmore is when you have a big SAS shop where there's a lot of different SAS projects going on and then maybe you want to pull data from different ones or whatever. But anyway, it kind of makes sense if you have a big SAS shop to do this. Let's go to the white paper for a second here. Now, here in Enterprise God, you can access various raw data, query and filter reports, select variables, control grouping and starting and run tasks. So already you're probably like, I can do that myself in command prompt. So you can imagine that why this is useful is if you want to, if you get good at it, you don't have to use the command prompt. If you get good at using this sort of WYSIWYG approach, then for your PROC tab, you can just start doing this. I think Sunil is a really good programmer, but I think what he did was good at this and then he just got faster, right. So what this kind of enterprise guide kind of reminds me of is if you ever log into a Microsoft SQL server instance, you can see all these tools in the SQL server for profiling the data or just doing easy select queries and stuff. That's basically SAS Enterprise Guide. That's SAS's version of that easy Microsoft SQL interface if you're familiar with it. Of course, even the easy Microsoft SQL interface is a challenge every time I see it. I'm like, okay, how do you use this thing. So you have to learn Enterprise Guide before you can be adept with it the way Sunil is. So here was that screenshot I gave you. He's showing here, you know, it's a little hard in a white paper to show how you're dragging things out. But he's like, this is done by selecting summary table task and clicking on the task options. Below is the result of the table produced. As you can see, retail sales has the strongest market segment with 80% of the market. So what you can kind of imagine is that in Enterprise Guide, let's say you get this and it looks nice. Now you've got to report it. You can run it again. So it's basically like you're kind of building your own like SAS interface environment thing in Enterprise Guide. And there's nothing wrong with it. Like obviously if you're like Sunil and you got this thing going, you can get really good with it. So, but the problem is like if you have a big SAS job and you already have everything set up, why go get Enterprise Guide. What's kind of cool now is that SAS is making a lot of like unusual components available, like rarely used components available. And I think you can practice with Enterprise Guide. So it's the kind of thing where if you're going to a SAS shop that has Enterprise Guide, you're going to want to learn how to use it right away. So, you know, I didn't even look. I wonder if in SAS, do any of you know if SAS ODA lets you practice Enterprise Guide? Let me see here. Practice Enterprise Guide SAS online. Let's see here in Corsair, you learn in Corsair. Let's see if they have something in Enterprise Guide. And you know, to be honest, I don't know if these SAS courses are great, but if they're free, I'll take it. Okay, so we have administering SAS Office Analytics and SAS Enterprise Guide, but that's probably not what you would want. And Enterprise Miner is getting really popular now because it's basically like Enterprise Guide only you're doing mining, data mining, which I'm not sure how that's slightly different, I guess. And then here, I think this would be the one. Yeah, creating reports and graphs with SAS Enterprise Guide. If you really wanted to know what to do, like Sunil was doing in there, then I would take that class. Let me see if they have anything on integration. See, SAS is never very interested in integration. Like you kind of have to learn that on your own. Yeah, there's a lot. Here's a bunch of SAS Enterprise Guide down here. This I would think is what you would want. So if you saw a job, if you're already SAS user, and you saw a job available, and they are using Enterprise Guide, I would take these courses right here. So you could say, well, I know SAS and I took these courses Enterprise Guide so I can know how to adopt it. Because as you can see, like I can only in a half hour I can only sort of explain what it does and all the different things it does. It's kind of up to you and what your shop is, is what you're using like Sunil is using all this reporting. Usually I'm doing like a whole bunch of data like integration like uploading and putting it together ETL stuff. But we all know what SAS actually does. We know what the procs are and stuff. And this is mainly just a way of automating them and putting them in order and being able to edit them. But then that always takes a lot of organization. Let me see if I can get this right here. So I would say the take home message about SAS Enterprise Guide for SAS State integration. If your SAS shop is not adopted Enterprise Guide, don't just install it for the purpose of data integration. Now, if your SAS shop is not adopted Enterprise Guide, and you want to do automation, I'm not sure if the right answer is to start with Enterprise Guide. You might want to just jump to Viya and of course it depends on your shop. But if you already have SAS Enterprise Guide at your shop, then go ahead and you want to do data integration. Go ahead and just start trying to do it. Like again, you have to create code that runs and sort of a pipeline. I would suggest you make a diagram. Once you've got all that, then you fire up Enterprise Guide and you try to drag everything into it and build it the way you envision it. I guarantee you that, well, I don't know if I can get it, but I probably can guarantee you that before Sunil started setting up a lot of those reports in his Enterprise Guide, he did them by hand. Because you have to know what you're looking for. And then after that, you can start dragging and dropping, you know what you want. And then, so like if you, like I put an example here, let's say you're importing a small reporting data set each month from a local SQL server to help run reports out of your SAS server. So for example, let's say you see a little data from the SQL server like some summary statistics and you've got to pull that in when you run your reporting and your automating your reporting. That's where you could easily do Enterprise Guide data integration. And again, if anybody here has used Enterprise Guide or is used to using it, you know, feel free to talk about it. All right. And I encourage you to read that white paper because see the problem with SAS is it's not like R or Python where you can just demonstrate it. You know, even if I try to demonstrate something in SAS ODA, you saw how long it takes to connect. It's just like really not very easy software. But it's really important to know all the different components because once you're on the other side and you're in a SAS shop, you need to be able to leverage what you've got to get your work done. So anyway, if anybody has any questions, go ahead and ask them or anybody wants to say anything. I just wanted to thank you for showing up today for this quick little sort of overview and remind everybody that you can connect with me on my blog or on LinkedIn or with my email. But and also please consider coming to my free online workshop if you have time, and we can talk more about ways to do SAS integration. If you come to this workshop, you can talk actually because I don't know if there's going to be a lot of people there. Like we'll have times where we can actually discuss so we can discuss real situations and see if maybe Enterprise Guide would be right for you. So thank you very much for showing up and if there are no questions, I will end the session and I hope you have a good weekend.