Access Your Data
September 22, 2017
Access Your Data
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SAS/Access
I currently use SAS/Access to analyze data coming in from the state level Behavioral Health Risk Factor Surveillance System and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. I focus on tobacco data and SAS is extremely important when looking at this data. I use SAS STAT to analyse the data using survey procedures. Because BRFSS and YRBS are complex surveys I must use the survey procedures in SAS to get weighted frequencies, means and estimates. It is extremely easy to use SAS for these analyses, because the procedures are pretty repetitive. However, I do wish that the strata, weight, and cluster variables did not have to be typed with each procedure done. When using STATA or SPSS these variables are entered once, and the weighted results are automatically given when writing procedure. No need to enter them in for each. However, I am more comfortable with SAS coding and really like that it is user friendly. The online support for SAS is wonderful as well.
- SAS/Access is great for manipulating large and complex databases.
- SAS/Access makes it easy to format reports and graphics from your data.
- Data Management and data storage using the Hadoop environment in SAS/Access allows for rapid analysis and simple programming language for all your data needs.
- SAS/Access coding is not as simple as SQL query language. SAS/Access requires the user to have prior knowledge of SAS coding and data-set manipulation.
- SAS/Access support is not as good as Base SAS support, there is not much help if you want to do a specific format or data merge with your datasets.
- SAS/Access is a bit expensive compared to SQL, but if you already have Base SAS it is not as expensive.
- SAS/Access has worked so that people do not have to be retrained in SQL.
- We have more access to all relational and un-relational databases.
- However, not many people are familiar with SAS/Access making it hard for collaboration.
SAS/Access can work well with MySQL. There are some coding differences between the two, for example how missing values are handled or rules for variable names. MySQL has simpler coding, but if you are familiar with Base SAS, it is not too difficult to learn. With SAS/Access the user has more freedom with formatting the databases from the data source that they are pulling from. Also, modeling and analysis is easier in SAS. SQL does not do much with graphics or modelling.