Part Three—Expanding the WHAT and the WHY, along with the HOW of the SAS Hash Object

Our Proof of Concept project could have wrapped up after the completion of Part Two. Virtually anyone who has worked on a project knows that there are always what one could refer to as the Yea, BUT issues and questions. Every project has numerous such issues/questions.

Part Three contains three chapters that address issues the authors have encountered in projects they have collaborated on that involve the SAS hash object.

1.   Chapter 9 describes an approach to minimize hard coding via a metadata approach. Metadata (AKA parameter files) are used to revisit previous examples in order to both minimize hard-coding and to provide more flexibility in the use of the SAS hash object to address business intelligence questions.

2.   Chapter 10 provides a more detailed discussion (compared to Chapter 6) of the SAS hash object as a flexible (in-memory) Dynamic Data Storage facility.

3.   Chapter 11 discusses several approaches to addressing memory management issues when the size of the data exceeds the memory capacity of the available environment. Techniques are presented to minimize key length as well as to partition the data into separate buckets or groups that can be processed either sequentially or in parallel.

Part Three is targeted to both our business and IT users. For the IT users, its goal is to acknowledge that such issues are real and there are reasonably straight-forward solutions. For the business users, the intent is to provide them with information that they can use to push forward with such projects.