What was SAS?

SAS was a commercial version of a previous public-domain software platform for transforming and analyzing data. It hit its peak between 1998 and 2005, riding the data warehousing wave in enterprise IT. During that time, it was used by most large businesses and research universities. SAS was driven by a programming language, also called SAS, that allowed users to have precise control over the way data was organized and transformed. SAS was especially prized in the fields of pharmaceutical research, financial fraud detection, marketing, and computer system management.

What killed SAS?

Two factors in particular, Enterprise Guide and sprawl, led to SAS’s startling decline. Enterprise Guide was an add-on that forced users to deal with processing in building-block units. No longer able to control the processing that SAS did with ease or precision, users mistakenly began to see SAS as a clunky, low-feature platform.

The second factor was sprawl. The increasing complexity of the SAS platform eventually made the software almost impossible to install. The scale of the installation effort was a substantial barrier to entry. The high cost of installing an upgrade ultimately made SAS 9.4 the sunset version of SAS, with no prospect of future upgrades.

Does SAS still exist?

SAS has not gone anywhere, but . . . SAS’s presence has declined by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude from its peak; and SAS has pinned its hopes for a future on an in-memory architecture (SAS Viya) that bears only a passing resemblance to the SAS of the past and that only amplifies the problems that led to SAS’s decline.

What was Global Statements?

Spanning 25 years, Global Statements was the largest web site by traffic for SAS users seeking information on SAS programming. Design discussions and code samples emphasized the use of a software engineering paradigm in SAS programming.