Date:         Wed, 10 Mar 1999 17:30:49 -0600
Reply-To:     Henry Feldman <hfeldman@CONCEPTUAL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From:         Henry Feldman <hfeldman@CONCEPTUAL.COM>
Subject:      Re: Licensing Costs Again; WAS: Yet more thoughts on SAS for Linux
In-Reply-To:  <s6e6a221.011@aamc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 04:47 PM 3/10/99 -0500, you wrote:
>This issue is particularly current for me as my SAS rep just gave me our new
>SAS costs. Our organization is considering a change in our data warehouse,
>which would require us changing our SAS/Access to... module. In order to get
>the new module SAS will make us move to their new pricing structure.
>The new cost is so outrageous that my recommendation to the powers that be
>is to scrap SAS altogether and use STATA and SPSS.  And this from someone
>who has used SAS every day for the last 8 years.
>SAS needs to get real. As much as I love the product, I am ready to ditch it
>altogether if only to add my vote for new prices.
>If you are considering SAS for your organization, don't!
>Lynn
>
 
At the end of January, 1999.   I posted the following email to the SAS-L.
It has been suggested to me that I post it again since there seems to be
interest in a package which gives you the programmability of SAS without
the cost of SAS.  Never to turn down a suggestion from a happy user, here
it is again.  I will say this, the posting in January was to get DBMS/COPY
users to help beta test.  I post it again in the hopes of establishing a
dialogue of what is needed in a package like the one I'm developing which
would enable you to use effectively.  I would like this to broaden out
beyond DBMS/COPY users.
 
Many years ago I wrote a package called PRODAS.  This is a package with
syntax similar to SAS  and it did pretty well in the DOS environment.  In
1988, I stumbled upon the DBMS/COPY idea and that took over my life.   (Not
that I'm complaining.)   PRODAS is still used today to track the nation's
AIDS patients, hospital infections and the analyze the nation's prison
population.
 
Well, I've finally gotten around to porting PRODAS to Windows.  It works
with DBMS/COPY.
 
This first phase is a major enhancement of the batch processing
environment.  (Nothing interactive, except the built-in runtime debugger
which is pretty nice.)
 
If you are familiar with my PRODAS package, the following modules are
available:  program, crosstab, unistat, report, value, sort, regress,
tabulate and transpose.
 
If you are familiar with SAS, these modules are similiar to the following
SAS procs:
        data step
        freq
        means
        summary
        univariate
        print
        format
        sort
        tabulate
        rsq
        stepreg
        reg
        transpose
 
A macro language is also implemented.  There are additional interesting
features which I will not bore you with now.
 
Bottom line, this beta should interest you if you manipulate multiple input
and output databases, need by group processing, read/write poorly
structured ASCII files, need to do "data step" kinds of things or want to
perform tabulations.
 
If this capability interests you (DBMS/COPY user or not), please let me
know.  Let's get the dialogue going!
 
Thanks for your time.
 
Henry
 
 
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Henry Feldman              henry@conceptual.com
Conceptual Software, Inc.     (713) 721-4200
9660 Hillcroft #510       fax:(713) 721-4298
Houston, TX  77096       web: http://www.conceptual.com/
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