SAS crash with BULKLOAD and ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server

SAS 9.4 (TS1M2) crashes hard when using BULKLOAD=YES with the latest Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server. For a brief moment you may see in the SAS log ERROR: BCP initialize error: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server]Connection is not enabled for BCP, and then the SAS window closes.

The Windows Event Viewer has the following information:

Faulting application name: sas.exe, version: 9402.0.21456.21239, time stamp: 0x53d05339
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18229, time stamp: 0x51fb1072
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x000ce753
Faulting process id: 0x5724
Faulting application start time: 0x01d004d90519e3fc
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\SASHome2\x86\SASFoundation\9.4\sas.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll
Report Id: 4c84f206-70cc-11e4-bd42-0205857feb80

SAS Support acknowledged the crash and will address it in the next maintenance release. At this time I do not see any KB article.

Fibonacci sequence in R and SAS

Because the Fibonacci sequence is simply defined by recursion, it makes for an elegant programming exercise. Here is one way to do it in SAS, and another way to do it in R. I've also included unit testing code to check that it works.

Write directory listing to CSV in Windows PowerShell

This one-line command will invoke Windows PowerShell to write a directory listing to a CSV file, which is easy to use in spreadsheets and database programs. It recurses subfolders, and it includes the following information: full file name, creation time, last modified time, file size, and owner (last modified by).

To use it, simply modify the two paths: directory to scan and path to the CSV.

powershell "Get-ChildItem -Recurse c:\directory\to\scan\ | ForEach-Object {$_ | add-member -name "Owner" -membertype noteproperty -value (get-acl $_.fullname).owner -passthru} | Sort-Object fullname | Select FullName,CreationTime,LastWriteTime,Length,Owner | Export-Csv -Force -NoTypeInformation c:\folder\to\directory.csv"

Tested on Windows 7 Enterprise.

I use it as part of an automatic process to archive a folder with Git.

Change the process priority in SAS

This SAS code programmatically changes the process priority for the current SAS program. You may want to use this for SAS batch jobs.

For example, when I run multiprocessor jobs using Ian J. Ghent %multiThreadDataStep macro, the Windows user interface becomes less responsive and my batch job competes with other processes, but using this method addresses both issues.

Simply run the line corresponding to the desired priority level. To decrease process priority, choose one of the last two.

x "wmic.exe process where processid=""&SYSJOBID"" call setpriority 'high priority'";
x "wmic.exe process where processid=""&SYSJOBID"" call setpriority 'above normal'";
x "wmic.exe process where processid=""&SYSJOBID"" call setpriority 'normal'";
x "wmic.exe process where processid=""&SYSJOBID"" call setpriority 'below normal'";
x "wmic.exe process where processid=""&SYSJOBID"" call setpriority 'idle'";

Tested on SAS 9.4 on Windows 7 and SAS 9.3 on Windows 2008.

I don't have SAS for Linux, but I guess it would look like this to increase the niceness and therefore reduce the process priority:

x "renice -p 16 &SYSJOBID";

Visualizing principal components with R and Sochi Olympic Athletes

Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is used as a dimensionality reduction method. Here we simply explain PCA step-by-step using data about Sochi Olympic Curlers.

Type I error rates in test of normality by simulation

This simulation tests the type I error rates of the Shapiro-Wilk test of normality in R and SAS.