SAS Enterprise Guide Reviews

Our primary use case is to analyze the sales data of our company. We have an in-house database that has all data relating to our agents and our production. I use it when I want to have a quick check on the data. I'm the finance system and process senior manager in the company.

I think that this solution is a good start to get into the data analysis field. The license for this is not per user so anyone who wants to use the product can approach it, and can take a look at it, rather than it involving a lengthy process. If the solution was per user, we would need to take into consideration whether it was necessary for a particular user to access it. I think that's how it changed our business. Previously we had a dedicated data team, so every request needed to be sent via them. Now the solution is open to everyone in the company so they can get on board with all the data analysis.

I think the Query Builder is very valuable. You just need to track and drop, everything is on the interface, without the need of too much coding.

For improvement, I think the user interface is too complicated. For some of the advanced functions, you need to learn some SAS code in order to get what you want. I'm ideally looking for is something that is purely code free and user friendly, which doesn't require any kind of programming.

For additional features I really want something that can make it easier for me to schedule the programs. I do know that SAS now has a solution to schedule the program, but if it could be something built-in within the SAS Enterprise Guide, that would be great.

I've been using this solution for about three years. 

I think it is quite stable. In some circumstances, such as suddenly losing internet connection, it might return an error and you need to restart the whole program in order to make it work. 
Sometimes some data can be lot but overall I think that the stability is good.

Due to the subscription mechanism, everyone in the company can use it so it's very good in terms of scalability.

I haven't needed to contact technical support because they have a very large online community for support and I can easily find the answers to what I need just by using Google.

I think initial setup is quite straightforward but if you compare it to say, Access, then  it's more complicated to use than other, more traditional tools.

Anyone implementing this solution should check the online manual where they have very good information on how best to use the product. Whenever you have a problem that needs to use a data solution, you can just do a quick Google, and add in the link to that website, and it can show you a lot of solutions. There are also free education manuals and training courses from SAS itself. It's worth taking a look at the SAS programming essential one, and get used to this product. 

Always save your data!

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

We use this solution for moving users that need statistical data analysis and data transformation functionality that do NOT have a background in programming and/or SQL to a tool that allows for some degree of self-service. It also provides access to data sources (databases that require administrative access) that do not support individual user access.

Users that want to code SAS but don't have expertise or comfort coding and/or running SAS in a Unix background will use this as a SAS IDE, and not as a true graphical process environment with the ability to "re-use" common process patterns. If the user base can be given some good basic guidelines it can be a serious productivity improvement tool.

Statistical functionality and basic database interaction can become very straightforward for business users that don't have a background in SQL and data analysis. It allows business customers not familiar/comfortable with Unix environments to continue to use SAS functionality with interaction to data sources that are outside of their immediate control (application databases on remote hosts).

I would like to see integration with schedulers when run from hosting environments such as Citrix. Currently, SAS Enterprise guide in  CITRIX hosted environment appears to have access to Windows task manager to schedule EGP's. However, as soon as the client logs out due to windows "roaming profiles" being dynamic the scheduler does not work! It does not fail just doesn't do anything.

In administered/remote client/server environments( such as CITRIX), the ability for users to catalog and save database metadata independent of administrators interaction and support would be helpful.  Currently the user must (with the help of an administrator ) access a database from SAS Console with a valid credential and retrieve the database metadata (limited to what the user has access to via credential). If each user has potentially different access rights based on ID/password at the database an administrator with greater privileges must login to the database and catalog the metadata to cover ALL of the database metadata potentially used by any single user/group and then make it available to all groups. 

We have been using this solution for three and a half years.

Everyday use for application development (reporting, data analysis, scoring, and ETL). 

SAS EG really helped us fix a security problem with SAS PC by bringing the data on a secure SAS server. Then, we could have the end users use SAS EG for work with SAS. This secured the overall solution, also bringing better performance by having people work on a powerful server instead of a workstation.

Some of the tasks provided are really useful, such as "characterize data". This feature saved me a lot of time in the past years by providing me with a complete picture of a data table with just a few clicks. It is great for profiling data.

I feel that the performance could be increased by leveraging multi-thread with any SAS BI platform, not just the high performance ones.

I see no reason for limiting the process to sequential all the time.

People used to work with SAS PC a lot where I used to work. This was causing security issues with data residing on physical PCs.

I use it for quality assurance and identification of outliers. EG is great for a quick standardized sort of analysis.

It has definitely improved our communication with senior management.

The point and click makes it easy to transfer the knowledge to new employees. It is also compatible with other softwares, such as Excel. 

Sentiment analytics would be a great feature to add into EG, as well as compatibility with machine learning languages, such as Python and R. 

It is the solution that we have been using since before I started working at my organization.

SAS EG is an excellent tool for data manipulation and analysis.

SAS EG has evolved significantly, especially in the past 10 years. It has improved tremendously moving from providing an easy menu-driven system to also providing an excellent platform for developing and running full production systems, with minimal coding, which enabled increasing popularity among many non-programmers. As result of this, the application overall helped greatly improve the efficiency of the organization.

SAS EG offers many excellent features, such as parallel execution on the same server, controlling output datasets in the process flow, and conditional processing. Just to name a few.

It would be very useful if EG could be enhanced to automatically file and clear the project log to ensure non-stop running of the project.

I have been using SAS for over 20 years and EG since its inception. I am happy with its power to manipulate data in a flexible, efficient way.

SAS/EG is a very good tool for data management and analytics tasks. You can use the workflow to create jobs in a guided mode or you can write code in SAS/BASE. The workflow possibility is a very good option, because you don't need to know programming to create analytics projects.

This tool has improved the work in customer intelligence or business intelligence departments.

I found difficulties when trying to connect to Big Data environments, such as Apache Spark.

For 10 years using SAS/EG and SAS/BASE.

No.

No.

An eight out of 10.

I have also used R. Both are good tools.

The initial setup was not complex. It took only two days.

I think the price is high. Now you have alternatives, open source to do analytics projects, and the licensing of SAS/EG is expensive.

I have also used R. Both are good tools.

If you have enough budget, it is a very good tool. It's important to take into account that if you need to work with advanced models like neural networks or random forest that models are not supported by SAS/EG, you will need another SAS tool, such as SAS Enterprise Miner.

We make the most use of scheduled processing with Base SAS. If there is an error in one process, the others do not run as well because of possibly one error. Therefore, we now mostly use the Enterprise Guide for such scheduling purposes, so error processes will not inhibit the others.

SAS EG improved my organization. We do not bother any longer with some programs did not run, hence having to rerun them again. 

Scheduling downtime of some programs has been eliminated. The process flows are a very exciting feature to use. Also, for the tasks, this makes it easier to just filter without having to really code.

A log belongs to each program. I have experienced a situation where when I run just the exec files, it replaces the whole log and I wanted to see the earlier log, then this was not possible.

• Data preparation
• Statistics.

Efficiency.

Click and drop function.

Licensing.