What needs improvement with SAS Enterprise Guide?

I find it challenging when I need to use certain functions and predictive modeling techniques in SAS. The procedures and data steps for database analysis take longer, and I've noticed that the current version we are using, lacks support for advanced modeling techniques. We've requested support for these advanced algorithms, but it seems there have been challenges in implementing them. As a result, we are facing difficulties in developing advanced models. Another issue we've encountered is that the community support for SAS is relatively limited compared to open-source environments.

Recently, we realized that SAS Enterprise Guide is not so stable and gives us some outputs which are not suitable, but it works well on rerunning the program. Sometimes it's quite hard to report its stability issues. Most of the time, its stability issues need to be reported with which our colleagues help. Another issue is that SAS Enterprise Guide gives us hardware output, but when we run a program that does not run correctly, we don't know what's wrong even though the output is good. When we try to report to technical support and they run the program, they cannot find anything from the log, but it is the same issue we find in the solution when we run it afterward. Sometimes we need to restart the computer, and it works, which is not so good. We set up quite a few programs to autorun, and sometimes the customer is not confident that the result would be good. It would be easier to use the solution if it had more functions. The solution needs to be more stable. The additional feature I want to see in the future would be visualization because, currently, the visualization from SAS is a bit like Python or similar ones in general.

The stability of the solution can be improved.

We don't use SAS Enterprise Guide that much here because we haven't explored some of the statistical modeling capabilities. However, I do not think SAS Enterprise Guide provides all the machine learning features that we want. Those would be separate products from SAS, such as SAS Buyers or any of the other solutions, which will give us the capabilities that we are looking for.

It crashes more frequently than I would like. For example, you can create projects, but with our data system, the field changes from time to time. Our data-driven managers will occasionally attempt to update. They speed up everything and change the names of the fields slightly. When you go back in there and try to make changes, the project frequently crashes. When you attempt to make those various changes. And it can take some time to get it right. I guess what I'm working on right now is a project that I completed two years ago and needed to be re-run. It's also crashing because the data fields have changed. It just gets stuck in a never-ending loop. Then you must control, alt, delete, and return to the program's main menu to exit. That's a little frustrating. I would like it to give more information rather than just a forever loop that forces you to shut down the system. Give you more error messages without stopping the entire project, or even the entire application. That it displays more error messages rather than terminating the application.

It is expensive.

Our data warehouse is built on the Netezza database. We have SAS BI, and we populate the Netezza database. When we have tables with, for example, a hundred million rows in Netezza, SAS Enterprise Guide doesn't work. It doesn't return any results. It works for around 30 to 40 million rows, but it is not working for anything more than that. This issue is only with the Netezza database. With Oracle, it is quite good. They can improve its performance with the Netezza database. There should be one unique tool that includes SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide for more integration capabilities. With SAS Enterprise Guide, it is not possible to create connections and libraries and build transformations that can be used for other projects. This tool should have all capabilities that SAS Enterprise Guide does not have. Such a tool would be perfect because it will be used by developers and business users at the same time. In addition to the integration capabilities, they should also provide more deployment capabilities. There should be an option to easily create SAS packages and export them from one environment to another. There could also be a possibility to connect with R and Python. Open-source tools are hot in the market nowadays, and it would be good to extend its capabilities.

They should provide more information for the errors or logs. Currently, it gives you just the error message without explaining anything.

I think machine learning should be added to the product. It already has virtually everything from the data wrangling perspective. Machine learning concepts could further enhance the user experience and the results. The concept of visualization could also be added because, currently, we need to use a separate tool. We use Business Objects for data visualizations. Competing products — like in case of Alteryx that is just in trial versions for now — has both machine learning concepts as well as some of the visualization capabilities within the data profiling features. SAS Guide will have to have these features to keep up with competing products and their capabilities. If these elements do pan out properly in Alteryx, I may like it better than SAS Enterprise Guide overall. I have a data science background but the more advanced data science features are new in these products and they are very useful in analytics. So SAS should work on ML (Machine Learning) features, visualizations, and even more on ease-of-use. It is good but everything can get better.

I had difficulty with the diagrammatic flow chart style representation of projects. When projects got too large and complex (which was basically every project, except the most trivial). There just wasn't enough real estate to display the flow chart and dependencies without a lot of scrolling, even when a flow was down to minimum tasks. My recourse was making the flow less "atomic". E.g., rather than use the various subset, etc., tasks as program nodes to display the details, I would write chunks of code that did a few things and use them as SAS program nodes.

For improvement, I think the user interface is too complicated. For some of the advanced functions, you need to learn some SAS code in order to get what you want. I'm ideally looking for is something that is purely code free and user friendly, which doesn't require any kind of programming. For additional features I really want something that can make it easier for me to schedule the programs. I do know that SAS now has a solution to schedule the program, but if it could be something built-in within the SAS Enterprise Guide, that would be great.

Now that I have experience with Tableau, I think the visualization part of SAS EG could be more user-friendly and easier to use. Tableau is very easy to use. It just does a lot of work by itself, including color schemes. I think that could be incorporated easily into SAS EG, which would make it a much better product. Then you would not need Tableau. Tableau just adds a few visualization aspects onto it, but it doesn't have powerful analytics like SAS. You can join a number of tables in SAS. That's what I find very useful. You can keep on doing that. You can just change one and get another report. You can save the script and run it again. SAS has all kinds of useful features, so I think it is very good for analysis. We actually saved millions of dirhams on licensing data, just by sitting here and getting data for a month. Now they're developing their routine using it as if it's Excel. I need to develop it because they don't really have it here. They were only using Tableau, but Tableau basically just sums up the analysis. It cannot do certain analyses. Mostly it's summing up and finding the fraction and percentage. You can easily do that, but it is a bit tricky to use because you cannot join so many tables and you cannot double it. That kind of function is not there in Tableau. That is the main drawback in Tableau. SAS is very good actually. It's not really user-friendly and it's difficult to configure as well. It's difficult to configure the graphs and charts. In Tableau, it's really easy to do that and I think that can easily be developed in SAS, considering that there are complex analysis functions already provided by the solution. It should also be easy to integrate any database like PostgreSQL. I have spent more than one hour on more than one occasion trying to connect it, but it did not work. I think that should not be the case. It should be just really comfortable to do this.

I would like to see integration with schedulers when run from hosting environments such as Citrix. Currently, SAS Enterprise guide in CITRIX hosted environment appears to have access to Windows task manager to schedule EGP's. However, as soon as the client logs out due to windows "roaming profiles" being dynamic the scheduler does not work! It does not fail just doesn't do anything. In administered/remote client/server environments( such as CITRIX), the ability for users to catalog and save database metadata independent of administrators interaction and support would be helpful. Currently the user must (with the help of an administrator ) access a database from SAS Console with a valid credential and retrieve the database metadata (limited to what the user has access to via credential). If each user has potentially different access rights based on ID/password at the database an administrator with greater privileges must login to the database and catalog the metadata to cover ALL of the database metadata potentially used by any single user/group and then make it available to all groups.

I would like to see better Charting in this solution.

Licensing.