NOTE: Enterprise Guide 5.1 - Now Shipping!

If you haven't already picked-up the news from elsewhere, I should tell you that Enterprise Guide 5.1 (EG 5.1) started shipping earlier this month. For SAS 9.2 and 9.3 only* at this point in time, EG 5.1 looks like it adds some decent new functionality. I'll be keen to see it running at SAS Global Forum 2012 in a few weeks.

The What's New guide lists many new features. The ones that caught my eye were:

• Improved grid support plus support for parallel execution of tasks. I shall be interested to see the degree of WORK library sharing between grid/parallel activity. This has been a weakness in out-of-the-box versions of EG to-date
• Ability to export your output as an xlsx file (for use in Microsoft Excel 2007+)
• For programmers, EG 5.1 offers additional autocomplete information (for data set names and data set column names)
• Sundry enhancements to Query Builder and OLAP Analyser
• Available as a 64-bit version, in addition to a 32-bit version

There's also an intriguing new tool called the Data Explorer. This apparently allows users to create views of their data with specific columns plus sorting and filtering. It sounds remarkably like the existing Filter and Sort task, so I'll be interested to understand the distinction between the two.

I hope to get my hands on a copy soon!

*I had understood that EG 5.1 was only available for SAS 9.3, but the EG 5.1 section of the What's New guide explicitly states "You can run SAS Enterprise Guide on either a SAS 9.2 or SAS 9.3 server."