Hi I work for a telecom company. We have to deal on daily basis with huge datasets (we have almost 2 million customers). We work with SPSS 9, 10, SPSS 10 server and SAS 8e desktop. I worked in SPSS 9 with databases over 3GB in size, with over 14M records. I also worked in SPSS 9 with tables with over 3000 variables and several tens of thousand records (I think the limit is somewhere around 32000 variables). I never tried this in SPSS 10, due to it's "bugginess". I usually resort on SPSS 9 for day to day work. I prefer it to ver. 10, except the cases where I have to deal with the records located on the SPSS server machine. It never crashed and it works pretty fast, but we use it usually for basic operations on huge datasets. SPSS 10 desktop (before 10.1.4 patch) crashed too many times on me so I avoid it as much as possible. I don't know nothing about ver. 11. I hope it will be better than ver 9 (which remains my reference). SAS is a wonder in integrating various data sources (Oracle, SPSS, Access, Excel, whatever - although it's soooo slooooow with Oracle when it comes to search or edit a record) but I find it hard to switch to it's script language and I prefer SPSS for data processing. Anyway, my experience with SAS is yet very limited. Did I mentioned that I like SPSS 9?

hth

Sorin SION Expansion Marketing Project Manager MobiFon S.A. ROMANIA GSM: (+4)092.628.309 Tel: (+401)302.18.15 Fax: (+401)302.14.17

-----Original Message----- From: Lauren Spitz-Moore [mailto:spitzl@careoregon.org] Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 23:42 To: SPSSX-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: SPSS Server

Hello,

I work for a Medicaid only health plan. Our membership has grown from about 30,000 - 90,000 over the last several months. We are running SPSS 10 (soon to be 11) for windows on the desk top. We analyze medical claims data that reside in SQL tables.

We now have a need to be able to analyze 500,000 - 1,000,000 records at a time with multiple variables. SPSS on the desktop has not been functioning well, even with increased memory.

We are considering SPSS 11 for the server, and would like to hear back from other folks who are using SPSS server to analyze huge data sets. It is really, really, expensive and we want to make the right decision. Feel free to comment on SAS desktop or Server if you have experience with either of those products.

Thanks much!

--Lauren

Lauren Spitz-Moore, MPA HA Research Analyst CareOregon 522 SW Fifth, Suite 200 Portland, Oregon 97204 (503)416-1453 voice (503)416-3720 fax