Chapter 1. Setting Up the SAS^® Software Environment

What is SAS? If you had never heard of SAS, most likely you would not have picked up this book. You may have thought about the airline, Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS), and wondered what an airline has to do with big data analytics. Other than the fact that airlines generate a lot of big data and they need to analyze it just like any other business, we are not talking about the airline. This book is about the SAS Institute, which is officially described like this SAS is the world's largest privately held software company. Third-party guide for referencing SAS trademarks, https://www.sas.com/en_us/legal/editorial-guidelines.html.

Privately held simply means the company is privately owned and does not sell stock. SAS, the software company that develops and sells SAS^® software, has been the world's recognized leader as the best analytics platform for 41 years and counting. SAS is also the name of the fourth-generation programming language that provides the framework designed and engineered to do data management for analytics, provide advanced analytic capabilities, and provide multiple ways to deploy the results into production systems. This book will provide an introduction to this powerful solution, give you some hands-on experience, and provide you with knowledge about how SAS scales from small data to handle Big Data Analytics with SAS. What is really nice about SAS is that it really is much more than a programming language; it is an analytics processing environment. It is designed to scale so that you can use the existing knowledge and skills you develop using SAS on any size data to do the same type of analysis and reporting on big data. The SAS environment helps distribute where the processing of the data occurs, so you don't have to. We will get into the details of how SAS does this in Chapter 7, SAS^® Software Engineers the Processing Environment for You, of this book.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Acquire a free version of SAS
• Learn how to use SAS Studio, a web-based GUI for programming SAS
• An introduction to the SAS programming language
• Write and execute several SAS programs
• Understand the different levels of the SAS platform
• Learn about SAS data storage options