SAS and UNIX: Rerunning Your Batches in a Smarter Way

Meet Yaroslav Haiovyi

Yaroslav received his Master’s Degree from the Kharkiv National University, department of Mechanics and Mathematics. He successfully graduated from Intego Group’s University SAS Training program where he received his SAS Certificate. He currently resides in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Yaroslav has 4 years of experience in Clinical SAS, namely, oncology, ophthalmology and rare diseases studies. In his free time, he likes riding his bicycle and playing board games.

Introduction to SAS and UNIX Presentation

Every programmer who works with huge amounts of data knows that it takes a lot of time and computational resources to rerun all the datasets and outputs every time after receiving a data update. Sometimes not all raw datasets received by a team are changed, but it is necessary to rerun all programs based on new data anyway. This paper is going to provide a review of UNIX tools that help a programmer to do this in a smarter way, namely the “makefile” command, which is usually included in UNIX systems, and to demonstrate a SAS® program which can be helpful in such situations. The algorithm is based on the idea that not all programs need to be rerun, but only those depending on the datasets that have been changed.