A great post from Stephen Daniel about the value of SAS Enterprise Guide over at his blog.
I have to agree with all his points, the only negative I would add is that its integration with the SAS Metadata Server is not where it should be, but it gets better every release, bring on EG 4.2!
EG is a no brainer for any user who has never coded in SAS and a must have for any data analysts worth their salt.
However I have always struggled to persuade seasoned SAS Programmers to make the move. Apart from Graphs, they can always wack out code faster than they can use EG (and I have even tried a few shoot out’s to prove the point).
However with EG projects no being included in Metadata Impact analysis, the improved security capabilities EG allows and the licensing benefits compared to a fully loaded Base SAS PC, corporations are starting to make the decision for them.
Having said that the self proclaimed “SAS Uber Geek” in New Zealand has almost seen the light regarding SAS Data Integration Studio, so maybe he will see some value in EG will be next, and if he does I will be sure to post immediately.
As the self-proclaimed “SAS Geek” (sans Uber – that’s not for me to say), I will confirm that I do like DIS. Even possibly a lot. But I don’t like EG – it slows me down.
When Assist was put out with v6.03 (or thereabouts), I tried it and immediately hated it. When the Query tool was being pushed along with 6.07 (?), I tried it and again immediately hated it.
For someone who is used to SAS (and this is a personal view, of course), SAS/Assist was too basic, and for someone who knew nothing about SAS it was still too advanced without their learning about basic concepts. I think by the time they did, it still wasn’t up to scratch. The same goes for the Query tool, especially on a mainframe (where I first used it). There’s too much pointing and clicking, and little or no way to do repeated processes.
EG is more advanced than either of these, naturally. But I still find that the interface gets in the way of what I want to do. I have always raged against MS/Access (quite rightly!), largely because it was almost invariably used wrongly, but also because the paradigm that it set up didn’t map on to how I wanted to do stuff.
EG has a place, and a perfectly valid one. It’s a relatively cheap way to roll SAS out across an enterprise, but there will always be stick-in-the-muds like me who want something else.