Altair SLC (formerly the WPS industrial analytics platform, acquired by Altair in late 2021) is designed for data science and heavyweight data processing with the languages of SAS and R. Best known for its SAS language compiler, the software includes advanced graphical user interfaces, robust, high-performance data processing and production-ready application frameworks.
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SAS Enterprise Guide
Score 8.0 out of 10
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SAS Enterprise Guide is a menu-driven, Windows GUI tool for SAS.
To better understand the data I work with, I extensively use the data discovery and visualization tools available on my workstations, and I always go for the best. Unfortunately, some other tools does not offer any tutorials for the features, making it difficult and …
Unfortunately, Tableau Desktop does not offer tutorials for the features making it hectic and complicated to analyze data, mainly after implementation. WPS Analytics offers detailed tutorials in form of videos and articles for all features.
I use a lot of data discovery and visualization tools at workstations to help me gain deep insights into data. WPS Analytics doesn't vary much from all the DVD tools that I have listed, I always go for the best.
Python-based platforms like Pandas or Spark are very good too at displaying data and do exploratory analysis. I definitely prefer them to SAS EG. It's just too slow, and doesn't let you peek into the data very easily. Lots of clicking, and I'd rather just write some code, …
Although not used in the enterprise, I have used Anaconda Python to shape and cleanse data from Excel reports that was too difficult for SAS to complete. The object oriented nature and the Pandas package made ingestion of the data and reshaping more useful in this use case. …
SAS EG has better Graphical User Interface to build project trees and help users to create data queries/calculations. SAS EG can handle bigger data sets compared to other programs. You can easily clean the data sets and manipulate the data. It is easier to send the project tree …
Why I prefer SAS EG: Data processing speed is much faster than that R Studio. It can load any amount of data and any type of data like structured or unstructured or semi-structured. Its output delivery system by which we have the output in PDF file makes it very comfortable to …
I haven't used SPSS myself but from what I was told, integration of data was much more limited and not easy to used. Also, the number of people with SPSS knowledge is less than the number of SAS users so finding workforce can be an issue. The whole SAS solution just made much …
For now coders, I would emphasize them to use drag and drop functionality. Otherwise, WPS Analytics is a robust tool for app development and data visualization that offers multiple languages such as SAS, SQL, R, and Python.
For writing out longer code creation for shaping data on complicated reports, the clean UI is helpful. If exploring data though, SAS Studio would be better suited given its easier interface for GUI graph building.
I would like to see advance interactions with external databases to be able to kill ongoing queries from SAS. As of now, you can stop pretty much any ongoing process besides the one running on a remote database (killing SAS/EG doesn't stop the remote process)
When creating prompts for programs, it would be nice to be able to have conditional prompts (based on the selection of other prompts). The prompts are clearly a recent feature and constantly under development but I wish it would be more powerful.
More of a SAS metadata issue but when loading SAS/EG (first connection to the server), it takes a few seconds which feels like a long time. I really don't understand why the initialization of the session can take so long. Don't get me wrong, this has no real impact on productivity but that 10s delay just feels really like eternity when you want to run some code in a new session.
It's not all bad, but I don't believe that an enterprise purchase of SAS is worth the expense considering the widely available set of tools in the data analytics space at the moment. In my company, it's a good tool because others use it. Otherwise, I wouldn't purchase a new set of it because it doesn't have some of the better analytical functions in it.
Although I use SAS support for information on functions, these are SAS related and haven't really come across anything that is specifically for SAS EG.
I've not worked hands-on with the implementation team, but there were no escalations barring a few hiccups in the deployment due to change in requirement & adoption to our company's remote servers.
To better understand the data I work with, I extensively use the data discovery and visualization tools available on my workstations, and I always go for the best. Unfortunately, some other tools does not offer any tutorials for the features, making it difficult and time-consuming to analyze data, mainly after it has been implemented. In addition to videos and articles, WPS Analytics provides comprehensive tutorials for each feature.
Python-based platforms like Pandas or Spark are very good too at displaying data and do exploratory analysis. I definitely prefer them to SAS EG. It's just too slow, and doesn't let you peek into the data very easily. Lots of clicking, and I'd rather just write some code, rather do clicking.