scrottie++.

gunglichen, you don't explain what your application is and how you currently use SAS, so it's hard for me to make specific comments, but I'm going to drivel on anyway :-)

As well as Perl, I use SAS at work - it's used as the basis of our (multi-terabyte) datawarehouse, which I personally think is pretty horrific, and for marketing/customer research analysis on substantial amounts of data where it really shines.

I'm not really a fan of SAS - I generally don't use it as a statistical package, but as a datawarehouse/datastorage system.
Statisticians, analysts and pharmaceutical users seem to be the type of folk that will get the most from SAS - it's where SAS grew up, and it shows. There seems to be a push for SAS to move into the database/warehouse area, but I'm not too impressed.

The basic SAS does not handle parallel processing, concurrency, transactions and the like that you'd expect from an RDBMS.
There are additional SAS packages that help, but I'd rather use an RDBMS.

If you want to calculate regressions, aggregations, perform summarisations, and more analytical functions that I understand, SAS is one of those bits of kit that'll do the job.

Perl is neither an RDBMS nor a complicated statistics package.
It's a case of the right tool for the job.
Some of the SAS programmers I work with try and do everything in SAS, and it gets nasty quickly.
My colleagues are getting bored of me telling them they should be using Perl for that ;-)

SAS does have text processing capabilities, but I almost always extract the data, munge it using Perl, or stick in through some other bespoke software.

If you're using SAS to perform transforms, data storage, basic reporting, comparisons etc, maybe Perl plus some kind of database (from CSV to RDBMS depending on requirements) would do the job.
If you're storing, retrieving and querying data, use an RDBMS (and maybe Perl as a glue language).
If you want hardcore statistics, use SAS.

There is no way you could hope to replicate all of the statistical and reporting functionality or even a respectable subset that SAS offers using Perl.

Cheers.

BazB

If the information in this post is inaccurate, or just plain wrong, don't just downvote - please post explaining what's wrong.
That way everyone learns.

In reply to Re: Re: SAS vs Perl? by BazB
in thread SAS vs Perl? by gunglichen

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