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Thanks, but no thanks, SAS

By | September 30, 2008, 3:05am PDT

Summary: Yesterday I wrote about some data analysis I need to do. It turns out, there is quite a lot of analysis that needs to take place, along with fairly serious data management, especially as we start to relate MCAS scores with other data (SATs, special education testing, socioeconomic data, etc.). Having been a [...]

Yesterday I wrote about some data analysis I need to do. It turns out, there is quite a lot of analysis that needs to take place, along with fairly serious data management, especially as we start to relate MCAS scores with other data (SATs, special education testing, socioeconomic data, etc.). Having been a SAS programmer in a few former lives, SAS was an obvious choice for both the data manipulation and analysis.

I contacted SAS yesterday for a quote; mind you, I’d always used a copy supplied by an employer or school. While I knew that SAS wouldn’t be cheap, I was in for serious sticker shock when I received the quote. For those of you who have never used it, SAS is the industry standard for statistical analysis, data management, and, more recently, business intelligence. It is divided into countless modules, most of which can be purchased a la carte. To keep costs down, I asked for a quote on just the basics: SAS Base (the required main module), STAT (containing countless statistical functions), and GRAPH (for making school committee-worthy graphics instead of standard line printer output from the other modules).

I only wanted a single user license; it’s just me doing the actual analysis and SAS programmers aren’t exactly a dime a dozen in small, rural school districts. Care to know the first-year costs? Just to get started, we were already well over $5000. SAS requires a yearly renewal, as well, running about 40% of the year 1 costs. I could just see the blank stares as I tried to justify those numbers to the school committee.

Of course, this is the land of free and open source software. Nothing free or open source can fully replace SAS; there’s a reason it’s an industry standard and SAS is the largest privately-held software company in the world. However, at those prices, I’m more than happy with good enough. So I downloaded R, a very serious open source take on the S language (implemented commercially as S-Plus), found brief tutorial, and will start banging away this week on a new programming language and interface. It’s always good to learn something new, especially when something old costs as much as my budgets for my elementary schools.

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SAS Institute, Christopher Dawson

Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems. In 2011, he became the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network SaaS provider.

Disclosure

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson is the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., by day and a freelance writer and educational technology consultant by night. Well, most of his colleagues at WizIQ are based in India, so really he's working with them whenever he can stay awake. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now owned by Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years). Follett is paying him a monthly honorarium to act as a presenter for their "SIS Voices for Student Achievement" community (he produces occasional blog posts and hosts a monthly webinar on the use of student information systems to inform data-driven instruction and school-wide change. He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he does) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have). Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as have Dell and Lenovo with their educational offerings. He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair. Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Adobe provided him with a pre-release version of the CS5 Master Collection for evaluation and ultimately provided a full, licensed copy for ongoing testing of educational applications of this admittedly expensive software. Like the Gunnars, if the license expires or they come out with CS6, he'd actually go out and buy it himself. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff. Finally, because WizIQ is a virtual classroom and learning network provider, Chris, as VP of Marketing, frequently interacts with, seeks out deals with, and directly or indirectly competes with a whole lot of LMS, SIS, and other Education 2.0 companies. In general, he'll limit his reporting about these companies to news that does not impact his relationship with them or with WizIQ. If he reports on them, it's because what they are doing is newsworthy or worth the attention of his readers and not because he's trying to broker some deal, damage competition, or otherwise advance his position in his day job. LMS and SIS companies, along with other online learning communities, are a pretty important part of Ed Tech. If he stops reporting on them completely, there won't be a whole lot left. He'll be sure to call out any overt conflicts of interest if they are unavoidable. Finally, Follett Software Company pays him a little tiny honorarium every month to present on their SIS Voices webinars and to write the occasional blog or discussion thread for them. Since Follett recently bought X2 (maker of an awesome web-based SIS that Chris just happened to have used, served in advisory groups for, and frequently reported on), this is probably also worth disclosing.

Biography

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, a couple-year stint in private industry, teaching high school math and technology, and 2 years as the technology director for his local school district. Most recently, he started his own consulting business and is now the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network provider. He lives with his wife, five kids (yes, 5), 2 dogs, and a hateful cat in a small town in north-central Massachusetts. Although he is no longer teaching, his roles with WizIQ and ZDNet allow him to continue helping students and teachers add value to education with technology rather than merely adding to the bottom line.

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URL Correction
gjs1 9th Jan 2009
Group is OS4ED.com;
URL is http://os4ed.com/
View in thread
0 Votes
+ -
Some good R links
botchagalupe 30th Sep 2008
http://www.johnmwillis.com/r/are-you-using-r/
0 Votes
+ -
openIntel
educationtalk 30th Sep 2008
Try openIntel, a free data model offered by OSEd (
http://osed.com ). IT is free and it includes
documentation explaining it, the tables and the
relations. It was designed by Maurice Frank, the
original creator of the IBM Insight at School
education data warehouse. The data model can be used
with any database, PostreSQL is free and open source,
and it can be accessed by any standard reporting tool.
We used BIRT, a tool provided as part of the Eclipse
framework, which is supported by IBM among many others
as a standard Java development platform.

All you need to know is common SQL to generate your
data sets and then you use the graphical interface of
the BIRT tool ( http://www.eclipse.org/birt )to create
charts, tables, insert graphics, etc. It works
seamlessly with Apache web server and all reports are
delivered in HTML or PDF.

The only trouble you will face is getting the data
into the data model, but we will be happy to assist
you. You can use an open source ETL tool to do this.
i use Pentaho's Data Integrator, but there are others
out there like Talend or Jitter.

You do not need the power of SAS to do the majority of
reporting inn education. The real power is in the
data model that allows you to easily relate disparate
types of data to each other in a meaningful way.

We would love to help you develop and deploy a robust
reporting environment using common open source tools.
Take a look at the data model. It should address 85%
- 90% of your reporting needs that occur on a daily
basis.

Casey Adams, Founder & President
Open Solutions for Education
0 Votes
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URL Correction
gjs1 9th Jan 2009
Group is OS4ED.com;
URL is http://os4ed.com/
0 Votes
+ -
SAS would do well with a "home" version
Anton Philidor 30th Sep 2008
Meaning one without so many procs and elaborate options. The whole data management approach is approximately obsolete and could be simplified for the limited version.

So long as Excel doesn't have iterative processing there'll be a market for a limited functionality SAS. And if the company were ever to be purchased, I think such a product would become available in less than a year.

If SAS doesn't take this approach, then there may be an opening for another software company, assuming that a not-quite-adequate open source product doesn't preclude a competitor and protect SAS's expensive monopoly.
0 Votes
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I don't now if it's adequate
s_souche 30th Sep 2008
but SAS has another more lightweight software in its catalog : JMP
Its cheeper ( found a reseller at 1500? in europe in five minutes ) at its one time.
of course that exceeds the price of an open source solutions, but from what I remember of a quick overview five years ago, it really offers a GUI that simplify teh work ( not prorgamming language based ).
0 Votes
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That's still $2,000 to $2,500
Anton Philidor 30th Sep 2008
And most people wouldn't consider that a minor investment.

If module charges are also necessary, such as Excel to SAS, the price can quickly double, at least.

The functionality required by individual users varies considerably, but SAS seems highly expensive for all of them.
0 Votes
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Probability zero
John L. Ries 30th Sep 2008
SAS makes enough money marketing their wares to large corporations, universities, and government that I think it's highly unlikely that they would ever market to the small number of people that would be interested in using it at home. In all likelihood they'd be too afraid of commercial users cheating. The only things that could lower SAS' prices are a functional clone and a major deflationary spiral (either/or).

MS-Excel, of course, isn't even close to being in the same league, even if you know how to program in VBA (for one thing, it's hopeless for batch processing).
0 Votes
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Excel?
NCWeber 2nd Oct 2008
Why does everybody mention Excel? Excel is a calculator, not a database. You should be comparing with Access, or some other relational database software.
0 Votes
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I would like that
s_souche 30th Sep 2008
but strange things usually happen. While official dollar to euro rates are around 1.4 dollar for a euro, in practise it's often the other way round.

a technet subscription can be had for 250$ with a coupon, in france it's 350 euros, with no coupon available.

adobe photoshop is 690$ and 999?
even with taxes compensated you end up with a practical parity often around 1.2 euro for a dollar...

this is not always true some editor like to have the sama tag price in euro and dollars....
0 Votes
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RE: Thanks, but no thanks, SAS
JJ Brannon 30th Sep 2008
People dump on the school system, but as long as I could remember there were laways dedicated teachers who dug into their own pockets and donated their time for their students.

JJB
0 Votes
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No Dumping Allowed
NCWeber 2nd Oct 2008
I don't think this is a case of dumping on the system. The fact remains that educational budgets are small, and as such, are closely watched down to the penny in terms of spending. After all, how much you spend in one fiscal year determines how much you get in the next.

Personally, I still don't understand why a school text book costs three times as much as a consumer non-fiction book on the same topic.
0 Votes
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RE: Thanks, but no thanks, SAS
ppassman@... 30th Sep 2008
I have used the SPSS analysis software for a very reasonable price. SPSS is very supportive of education and offers excellent software support. Download a trial version at www.spss.com.
0 Votes
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My condolences
John L. Ries 30th Sep 2008
As a SAS programmer, I find the S language to be a major pain. I can do it, but I really don't like it for the sort of database management at which SAS excels.

If I ever become independently wealthy, I'm writing a SAS clone.
0 Votes
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I've used SAS extensively, but what about PSPP?
Garry_Robbins@... 1st Oct 2008
If you can get along with the basic stats, PSPP is an open-source alternate to SPSS.

http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/pspp.html
0 Votes
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RE: Thanks, but no thanks, SAS
jim.jenkins@... 1st Oct 2008
That strikes me as quite a decent price. The problem is that SAS and SPSS create a lot of value for commercial organisations so they have little trouble making excellent business cases to purchase the software at these high prices. It is clearly better business for SAS and SPSS to keep their prices high and fleece the business market than bother about reaching individuals. There is definitely room in the market for some niche players.
0 Votes
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SAS Learning Edition?
trent.smith@... 10th Oct 2008
Hey Chris, I work for SAS. There???s an inexpensive version of SAS designed specifically for educators called SAS Learning Edition. It includes Base SAS/V9.1.3 SP4, GRAPH, STAT, QC, ETS and Enterprise Guide 4.1. Here's a link. http://support.sas.com/learn/le/

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