in reply to SAS vs Perl?

Whenever I see phrases like "SAS provides a complete framework for delivering high-value enterprise intelligence that optimally integrates individual technology components within your existing infrastructure.", I assume they've been generated by some jargon program. Having looked at a few pages on the site, I *still* can't work out what SAS actually does...

Does Perl have powerful data manipulation and summarisation abilities

Yes, hence the acronym "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language".

...the right direction to start learning it

Check out "Learning Perl", written by our very own merlyn, published by O'Reilly and available pretty much eveywhere. (Hey merlyn - do I get any commission if he/she buys one? {g} )

Cheers, Ben.

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Re: Re: SAS vs Perl?
by tbone1 (Monsignor) on Aug 14, 2003 at 12:27 UTC
    Having looked at a few pages on the site, I *still* can't work out what SAS actually does...

    Ah, then you are qualified to be an IT manager charged with making corporate technology decisions. Congratulations.

    .
    .
    .

    (Not that I'm bitter ...)

    --
    tbone1
    Ain't enough 'O's in 'stoopid' to describe that guy.
    - Dave "the King" Wilson

[reply]
      If I were, I'd right now be 'doing lunch' with an SAS marketing droid and make a decision based upon how much the champagne cost... (BTW - I lied - I looked at just the one page, and gave up, bored.)

      :) Ben

[reply]
Re: Re: SAS vs Perl?
by zby (Vicar) on Aug 14, 2003 at 11:27 UTC
    AFAIK they specialize in making data aggregations (for relational data mostly). That is data that is preprocessed in some way to reduce its volume. An example can be a log file with timestamps accurate to a second. You rarely need that acuracy - so you can sum the number of records of each type in every hour and keep just the information of those sums. You'll still be able to extract any information you need from this data, but the you reduced the volume of the data - and those extractions would be much faster.
[reply]
      <tongue_in_cheek>

      Aha! So that's what "a complete framework for delivering high-value enterprise intelligence that optimally integrates individual technology components within your existing infrastructure" means! Is that something like... 

      foreach(@log) {
  /(some regex with captures here)/;
  push @{$hourly_site_log_sum{$1}{$2}},$3;
}

      [download]
      </tongue_in_cheek>

      :) Ben.

[reply]
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