NOTE: SAS Global Forum 2012 - Update #sasgf12

My Asus Transformer Android tablet refused to switch on yesterday afternoon and has continued to do nothing ever since. This is most annoying, it's less than a year old. I've resorted to typing-up my notes on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone. It works, but it's a slower process.

Anyhow, yesterday was an interesting day at SAS Global Forum. I didn't hear anything earth shattering, but I picked-up a lot of useful information.

One of the highlighted outcomes of the Sasware ballot was the addition of read-only global macro variables in 9.4.  I can't figure-out how I'd use that feature, but I guess there was some demand for it. Would you use it? I'd love to see a comment telling me how and why.

The morning's Technical Connections session featured five themes: high performance analytics, business visualisation, information management, decision management, and cloud. Some interesting items I picked-up were:

• Introduction of a tool for business rule storage and management within SAS. I need to spend time in the demo area to find-out more about this
• There have been plenty of demos of the new Visual Analyser at the conference.Its ability to create hierarchies on the fly, for drill-down, will be greatly appreciated by its users
• Visual Analyser's integration with mapping also caught my eye as a valuable and nicely implemented feature
• Following the introduction of a separate release track for BI tools and clients some while back, there'snow to be a separate release track for Stats and Analytics software too. The next release will be 12.1 (in August)
• SAS 9.4 is expected to be released early next year. SAS are interested in feedback on how they can help their customers move through versions more quickly. What version are you currently running? What stops you from upgrading and getting the latest and greatest stuff from SAS?