What is WPS?

The World Programming System (WPS) is a powerful and versatile platform for working with data. WPS software can run programs written in the language of SAS.

The supported syntax covers core, statistical and graphing functionality, and makes it possible to run many applications written in the language of SAS whilst the breadth of language support in WPS continues to grow.

The WPS Workbench IDE/GUI allows you to create, edit, manage and execute scripts and view the resulting output. Scripts can also be executed from the command line or in batch mode using WPS CLI.

Integrated Modular System

• Language Modules
• Developer Modules
• Interface Modules
• Data Engine Modules

More About Modules…

Multi Platform Availability

WPS is available on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Linux (including for System z), AIX, Solaris and IBM Mainframe z/OS.

More About Platforms…

User Interface

WPS can be used in a number of different ways:

• WPS CLI (Command Line Interface)
• WPS Workbench (IDE/GUI)
• WPS Link (Remote Server Connectivity)

Handle Large Data Volumes

WPS can read and write to many of the most commonly used data file formats, databases and data warehouses. It is capable of handling huge data volumes, wherever the processing occurs, be that on a mainframe, in a cloud, cluster, grid, server or workstation.

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http://teamwpc.co.uk/support/release/wps

Summary of Main New Features in WPS Version 3

For a more generalised overview of the current features of WPS, not just the ‘new’ features summarised below, please refer to the Product section.

Here are the main new features of the latest release.

• Multi-Platform Workbench
  The WPS Workbench (IDE/GUI) is now offered on the following platforms:

  - AIX
  - Linux (x86 and System z)
  - Mac OS X
  - Solaris (x86 and Sparc)
  - Windows

• Workbench Feature Enhancements
  The WPS Workbench has received many usability enhancements including:

  - Dataset import/export wizard.
  - 3rd-party eclipse plugin support.
  - Rename/delete datasets.
  - Assign/deassign libraries (libnames).
  - Find values in dataset viewer.
  - Enhanced dataset viewer display.
  - Automatic management of ODS HTML and Listing output.
  - Regular expression support in ‘find’ features.
  - Improved character set/codepage support.
  - Multiple concurrent WPS servers (see below).
  - WPS Link remote server capability (see below).

• Multiple Concurrent WPS Servers
  In previous releases of the WPS Workbench it was only possible to have one local server on which you could run your scripts. WPS version 3 allows you to set up multiple servers in the WPS Workbench and to pick which server to run any given script on. The WPS Workbench manages all the output, logs and datasets generated by each server for you.
  This enhancement, combined with the New WPS Link technology (see below) allows you to run your programs wherever you would like and control it all from the WPS Workbench.
• Remote Server Connection
  New WPS Link technology allows the WPS Workbench to link to remote WPS Servers on other Mac, Linux or UNIX servers and to run scripts on those machines. It also allows you to view any resulting output locally in your WPS Workbench on your local machine. This enables you to make use of centralised storage and processing resources including grids and clusters of WPS processing servers and removes the requirement to process or store any data on the workstation.
• Multi-Threading Summarisation
  Workstations and Servers with multiple CPU cores or hyper-threading can benefit from the new multi-threaded summarising engine in WPS version 3.
  This significantly improves the performance of many procedures within WPS that perform summarisation of data including PROC SUMMARY, PROC MEANS and other statistical procedures such as PROC TTEST.
• Microsoft Windows® Installer
  WPS for Windows now allows in-place upgrade without requiring the removal of previous version of WPS beforehand.
• Core Language Support
  WPS version 3 continues the expansion of it’s language support with even more new language items.
• Statistical Analysis
  The support in WPS Statistics has been expanded to include:

  - PROC DISTANCE
  - PROC FACTOR
  - PROC GLM
  - PROC GLMMOD
  - PROC PRINCOMP
  - PROC STDIZE
  - PROC TTEST

  PROC LOGISTIC has been improved to allow the following model selection methods FORWARDS, BACKWARDS, STEPWISE and FAST.
  Numerous other statements and options have been added to the DATA STEP and other PROCS.

• Financial Functions
  Support has been added for the following financial functions:

  - PMT
  - IPMT
  - PPMT
  - CUMIPMT
  - CUMPRINC
  - EFFRATE
  - NOMRATE

• DATA Step Enhancements
  Support has been added for MODIFY and UPDATE statements within the DATA Step as well as support for NOMISS and UNIQUE constraints. Numerous other enhancements have also been added to the DATA Step like the addition of the COMPGED, CALL COMPCOST and UUIDGEN DATA Step functions.
• Data Set Index Enhancements
  WPS support for data set indexes has been extended and optimised to offer faster index build and modification actions as well as faster index retrieval. Index creation speed has been dramatically improved. For example, on a 50 million row dataset WPS version 3 may create an index 10 times faster than WPS 2. The index files WPS version 3 produces are also significantly smaller than those produced by previous WPS versions, typically up to 50% smaller.
• Improved WPD Library Engine
  WPS version 3 has a new, improved version of the World Programming Data Set (WPD) library engine. WPD files generated by version 3.x cannot be read by previous version 2.X releases of WPS.

  Version 2 files can be read and written to by WPS 3 using the new WPDV2 engine.
  The WPD engine in WPS 3 can read version 2 datasets without program modification, however by default the WPD engine will now write WPS 3 datasets. Please see Upgrading comments below*.

• Sybase®
  A new WPS Engine for Sybase on Windows, Linux, Solaris and AIX platforms.
• XML Data Support
  A new Libray engine for XML in the WPS Core module provides generic XML data import/export support and use of Oracle, CDISC and XMLMAP transformations.
• PROC IMPORT/EXPORT support for Microsoft Access and Excel
  WPS version 3 now provides full support in PROCs IMPORT/EXPORT for Microsoft Access and Excel.