SAS Documentation Feedback

SAS Documentation is a wonderful resource. I have spent lots of time reading and searching through it, learning new things, refreshing existing knowledge, or trying to work out why something I am doing is not working. Very rarely you might encounter an error, as I did yesterday whilst reading about the changes in the recent SAS 9.4 M8 release. SAS have made it very easy to provide feedback when you encounter such things – up in the top right hand side of the page there’s a Feedback link, as highlight in the screenshot below:

Feedback button on the SAS Documentation site

Clicking on that link will open your email client and pre-populate a ready made email with the title of that page in the subject line and a link to the page in the body. All you need to do is provide your comments and hit send.

I was very impressed with the response to the feedback I provided yesterday. Reading my email this morning I already had replies and the documentation had already been updated too. How fast was that!

Spreading the WORK load

I found a handy tip from Rafi in the discussion Allocating SAS WORK Libraries Dynamically in SAS 9.2 in the LinkedIn group SAS Architects/Administrators/Implementation Specialist. It explains how to use a variation on the SAS system option WORK= to spread work libraries over a number of I/O paths using either random or available space methods. This can potentially help you improve I/O performance for work libraries en-masse, and/or get access to more available space, by spreading those work libraries over a number of different devices.

This usage of the WORK= SAS system option is documented in a number of places: