56 PART 2 Examining Tools and Processes

because individual learners need to be able to practice SAS even if they cannot

afford it, SAS developed a free, online version called SAS OnDemand for Academics

(ODA) that is available at https://welcome.oda.sas.com.

Originally, SAS ran as a command-prompt software without a guided user inter-

face, or GUI, which came later in the 2000s when PC SAS was invented. In the

original SAS, the user would gain access to datasets in SAS format that resided on

a SAS server in the same environment. The user would write code files using SAS

code and run these files against the SAS data. This action would produce a log file

that explained how the code was executed and reported any errors. It would also

produce output that provided the results of the statistical procedures.

Today, the experience of using SAS has been modernized. In PC SAS and SAS ODA,

it is easy to view code, log, and output files in different windows and switch back

and forth between them. It is also easier to import data into and out of the SAS

environment and create integrated application pipelines involving the SAS envi-

ronment. The new commercial cloud-based version of SAS called Viya is intended

to be used with data stored in the cloud rather than on SAS servers (see the later

section “Storing Data in the Cloud” for more).

SAS is entrenched in some industries, such as pharmaceutical, insurance, and

banking, because SAS has historically been the only program powerful enough to

handle the size of their datasets. Those settings traditionally used SAS servers for

data storage. Now, this practice is being challenged because other analytic options

may look more appealing than what SAS has to offer (see the section “Focusing on

open-source and free software”). In addition, many companies are having trouble

maintaining their old-fashioned SAS servers and want to move their data to cloud

storage. These industries are looking for SAS users to help them modernize their

operations.

Students often find that SAS is challenging to learn when compared to other sta-

tistical software, especially open-source software. Why learn legacy commercial

software like SAS today, when it is so much harder to learn than other software?

The answer is that SAS is still standard software in some domains, such as phar-

maceutical research. This means that even if those organizations choose to even-

tually migrate away from SAS, they will need to hire SAS users to help with the

migration.

SPSS

SPSS was invented more recently than SAS and runs in a fundamentally different

way. SPSS does not expect you to have a data server the way SAS does. Instead,

SPSS runs as a stand-alone program like PC SAS, and expects you to import data

into it for analysis. Therefore, SAS is more likely to be used in a team environ-

ment, while SPSS tends to have individual users.