SAS's web site is now making copious references to SAS 9.3, and yesterday's press release seems to be bigging-up SAS's "big data" capabilities. At a more technical and detailed level, there's a good summary of changes in the Support site, and a comprehensive What's New in SAS 9.3 publication in the SAS Documentation site.
I'm always intrigued to see what functions are introduced with a new release. Although I will inevitably forget 90% of them (it's an age thing!), they often provide a degree of interest. This time around I see lots of SOAPxxxx functions that provide interfaces to web services, a bunch of financial rate calculations, plus the following two that I hope to remember and use:
MVALID
checks the validity of a character string for use as a SAS member name.
SYSEXIST
returns an indication of the existence of an operating environment variable.
All I need to do now is get hold of a copy of the software.
Oh... and... I couldn't possibly make this post without highlighting the introduction of a new PROC... ladies and gentlemen, I give you... PROC GROOVY. Apparently, Groovy is an object-oriented programming language for the Java platform, but that's a far too dull explanation for a PROC which must surely return messages featuring words and phrases such as "cool", "far out", and "amazing".
