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SAS Enterprise Guide

Score8.1 out of 10

28 Reviews and Ratings

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What is SAS Enterprise Guide?

SAS Enterprise Guide is a menu-driven, Windows GUI tool for SAS.

Reviews

What users are saying about SAS Enterprise Guide.
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SAS EG is okay, does what you needed 10 years ago, but newer stuff is better

Incentivized
Ben HolmesView profile
Senior Data Scientist in Information Technology at Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Flexible to data sources
  • Works well across teams
  • Helps with SQL code writing

Cons

  • Difficult to write quickly, particularly if you need to change something in the data flow
  • Lots of clicking, slow to develop
  • Doesn't view data on the fly, hard to see what impact a particular change might have
  • Lots of licensing costs, very costly for what it does, basically equivalent to Pandas, but with huge cost tag

Return on Investment

  • Integrates IT development with analytical/business areas by giving a "code share"
  • Visual of data flow helps communicate process to others
  • Reasonably shares programs with team mates

Usability

Other Software Used

IBM Watson Studio (formerly IBM Data Science Experience), TIBCO Data Science (including Team Studio and Statistica), IBM SPSS Modeler

One of the best and easy to use tool for data analysis and data manipulation.

Akshaya BhardwajView profile
Consultant in Information Technology at WNS Global Services (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • It can load a huge amount of data as compared to R Studio and Excel.
  • Data processing speed is very fast, millions of records are loaded into this software very easily and data manipulation is also very easy.
  • Inbuilt Statistical functions and procedures make it very comfortable to use for non analytics professionals as well.

Cons

  • It is a costly software to use as compared to R studio and Python which are free for users.
  • No addition to the packages that are currently required for Image processing etc.
  • It is just a tool that is used for data cleaning or data manipulation or to draw statistical output. I think a number of tools are doing the same. No new changes that I have seen to it from the last 3-4 years.
  • Data visualization charts are not that good using the tool.

Return on Investment

  • SAS EG has improved the overall efficiency as data processing is very fast and the results are highly accurate.
  • It's one license cost is much more than the salary of some of the employees here and it takes a few months to recover that cost.
  • Overall profit has increased as people learn it very fast and start deploying the work very easily.

Alternatives Considered

RStudio and IBM SPSS

Other Software Used

RStudio, Microsoft SQL Server, Tableau Desktop

SAS EG : A wholesome tool to extend analytics capabilities, but cost could be a concern

Rohit NarangView profile
Assistant Vice President in Corporate at HSBC Commercial Banking (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • EG v7. 1 offers a GUI approach to query building as opposed to predecessors like Base SAS v9.1. It's easy for non-programming background users.
  • EG offers better connectivity with a remote server, while in an earlier version we had to segregate script using "rsubmit' blocks
  • Project files is a great feature (with process flow) in EG which was missing in earlier versions.
  • It's a preferred choice for people with SQL backgrounds, as proc SQL is a quite similar and easy to use procedure.

Cons

  • Proc Import & Export usage via code is still a problem, rather one needs to do it manually at times (using the wizard).
  • Visualization capabilities and cost could be an improvement that the next versions should bring.
  • Cost is also a concern compared to other products.

Return on Investment

  • Cost vs Technical Support ratio is high.
  • Analytical capabilities have improved department-wise (with credit risk).

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, QlikView

Usability

SAS/Enterprise Guide, the Analyst's swiss knife

Mathieu GaouetteView profile
Consultant BI senior - spécialité SAS in Information Technology at Prospective MG inc. (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Get detailed information about a datasource quickly with built in statistical tasks.
  • Join data from different of different nature from multiple sources (provided you have the associated SAS/Access component).
  • Structure projects with a visual interface and allow dependencies between them. Easy to structure and maintain.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Positive (cost): SAS made a bundle that include unlimited usage of SAS/Enterprise Guide with a server solution. That by itself made the company save a lot of money by not having to pay individual licences anymore.
  • Positive (insight): Data analysts in business units often need to crunch data and they don't have access to ETL tools to do it. Having access to SAS/EG gives them that power.
  • Positive (time to market): Having the users develop components with SAS/EG allows for easier integration in a production environment (SAS batch job) as no code rework is required.

Alternatives Considered

IBM SPSS

Other Software Used

SAS Enterprise Miner

Powerful tool for analysis

Incentivized
Verified User
Program Manager (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Map out process used to clean data and generate reports
  • Integrate with base SAS
  • GUI format is easy to use

Cons

  • Price
  • Getting started using this software can be intimidating

Return on Investment

  • It has been an essential part of our reporting capability.
  • Able to save time on recreation of reports or making necessary modifications.
  • Procurement process from our state has been challenging.

Alternatives Considered

IBM SPSS

Other Software Used

Qlik Sense, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Teams