What s New

Overview

New and enhanced features in Base SAS save you time, effort, and system resources by providing faster processing and easier data access and management, more robust analysis, and improved data presentation.

• By using new SAS system options that enable threading and the use of multiple CPUs, the following SAS procedures take advantage of multi-processing I/O: SORT, SQL, MEANS, TABULATE, and REPORT.

• You can now use longer, easier-to-read names for user -created formats and informats. See 'Rules for Words and Names in the SAS Language' in SAS Language Reference: Concepts .

• Two predefined component objects for the DATA step enable you to quickly store, search, and retrieve data based on lookup keys.

• The FILENAME statement now supports directory services, multiple FTP service commands, and Secure Sockets Layering (SSL).

• The Application Response Measurement (ARM) system enables you to monitor the availability and performance of transactions within and across diverse applications.

• The Perl regular expression (PRX) functions and CALL routines use a modified version of Perl as a pattern-matching language to enhance search-and-replace operations on text.

• New character functions search and compare character strings in addition to concatenating character strings.

• There are several new descriptive statistic functions and mathematical functions.

• New formats, informats, and functions support international and local values for money, datetime, and Unicode values. All data set options, formats, informats, functions, and system options that relate to national language support are documented in the new SAS National Language Support (NLS): User's Guide .

• A new ODS statement enables you to render multiple ODS output formats without re-running a PROC or DATA step. See the SAS Output Delivery System: User's Guide .

Note:

• This section describes the features of Base SAS that are new or enhanced since SAS 8.2.

• z/OS is the successor to the OS/390 operating system. SAS 9.1 is supported on both OS/390 and z/OS operating systems and, throughout this document, any reference to z/OS also applies to OS/390, unless otherwise stated.