Leveraging IBM Netezza With SAS

Customers who leverage IBM Netezza through SAS report radical performance gains.  Here are just a few examples of how IBM Netezza improves the performance of traditional SAS programs:

• Catalina Marketing reports run time for scoring jobs reduced from half a day to seconds ^[1]
• A pharmaceutical firm reports that it reduced the time needed to run a SAS process from nine hours to four minutes ^[2]
• With IBM Netezza, a leading US retailer is able to run a SAS DATA step that ran in three hours in one hundred seconds ^[3]
• Summarization processes for an Asia-Pacific bank that used to take fifty-one minutes now run in three ^[4]

Recently, at the request of customers, we surveyed users with experience leveraging IBM Netezza with SAS.  The goal of this ongoing project is to document and publish best practices and make them available to our customers.

The first release in the series includes two best practices, a Guide for Managers and a Guide for Programmers.  We are currently working on a Guide for Administrators, which we will publish as soon as it is complete.

The Guide for Managers is targeted to managers and executives who are responsible for a group of SAS users.  This Guide, which is written primarily in business language, outlines different approaches customers use to leverage IBM Netezza with SAS and identifies key personnel actions to take, from assigning accountability to organizing essential training.  The Guide includes several model implementation programs organizations can use to roll out SAS/IBM Netezza integration across the organization.

The Guide for Programmers is targeted to actual users of the SAS Programming Language, and provides explicit guidance on programming approach and syntax.  The Guide includes a number of sample SAS programs, and includes reference links for additional information.

This effort to document best practices is an ongoing initiative designed to help IBM Netezza customers succeed.  We welcome comments, feedback and questions.