[R] SAS or R software

[bogdan romocea]

neela v writes:
> Hi all there
>  
> Can some one clarify me on this issue, features wise which is
better R or SAS, leaving the commerical aspect associated with it. I
suppose there are few people who have worked on both R and SAS and
wish they would be able to help me in deciding on this.
>  
> THank you for the help
> 


I very much doubt you can make an informed decision if you leave the
commercial aspect (license) aside. A single Base SAS installation
(server) can cost tens of thousands of [[your currency here; may need
to multiply by 10 or 100 or more]] in the first year, then a
percentage of that in the following years. (SAS software is not
purchased, but licensed on a yearly basis.) Want more than Base SAS?
Prepare your wallet: thousands upon thousands (per year) for
regression, anova, clustering (SAS/Stat), graphics (SAS/Graph), time
series (SAS/ETS), optimizations (SAS/OR) etc. Then, if you want
decision trees and neural networks (Enterprise Miner), I warmly
recommend you to quickly find a chair and sit down before you hear
the price tag. 

Will you always work for an organization that licenses SAS software?
Will the organization license all the modules you'll need? Will those
modules do everything you want? As others have said, R is a lot more
flexible, and the GPL ensures that whatever you can do today will
continue to be expanded and improved (much faster than SAS Institute
would want or be able to expand/improve SAS). 

All in all, if you're primarily interested in data analysis (and
don't want, for example, to get a job as a SAS programmer) and still
choose SAS, you will regret it one day. The benefits are few (such as
robust manipulation of massive data sets - I mean in excess of
hundreds of millions of rows) and the risks are high (whatever you do
is dependent on proprietary, very expensive software). With R, almost
the opposite is true: lots of benefits and no risks (nothing can take
R away from you).

HTH,
b.
		
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