Third Party Extensions to WPS

WPS, which uses the language of SAS, and is much more moderately priced- recently announced Version 3

As per Minequest-http://www.minequest.com/

Prices start from $1206.

WPS  is a SAS language alternative application that can run most of your existing Base
programs without modification. WPS also provides support for a limited subset of
graphics via WPS Graphing and statistical procedures via WPS Statistics.

In addition to the broad language support, WPS is affordably priced and much less
restrictive in its licensing. WPS supports many elements of the language including
the macro language facility, the data step, most of the PROCS found in base, and
includes access engines to ODBC, DB/2, Oracle, MySQL, OLE DB, Informix,
GreenPlum, Sybase, Teradata, SPSS and other database systems.

WPS has a feature that allows you to develop extensions for it.

http://teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/modules/language_sdk

Develop Custom Language Items

Anyone who is familiar with traditional programming languages such as Assembler, C or C++ can use the WPS Language SDK developer module to add language items to extend the language of SAS support in WPS.

Once you have created your own custom language items, you can freely redistribute them to anybody who uses WPS on the same platform.

Some existing third Party extensions are-

http://www.minequest.com/Bridge2R.html

Bridge to R for WPS
The Bridge to R is an application created and developed by MineQuest that allows the WPS
programmer to access the R system. With the Bridge to R, WPS Users can write and execute R code
from within the WPS Workbench or in batch mode using WPS. A simple yet powerful integration facility
allows the WPS developer to write R statements to access advanced features found in R, test
algorithms and create new statistical methodologies.

One of the greatest advantages of the Bridge to R is that you and your developers can use the SAS
language for manipulating and reporting your data and use R for advanced graphics and statistical
computing. The Bridge to R allows WPS Users to write R code and execute R code from within the
WPS Workbench and receive the results back in the appropriate log and listing window. The Bridge to
R even supports running your WPS and R programs in batch for production purposes.

It allows you to use either 32-bit or 64-bit R depending on whether your OS platform supports 64-bit computing. On 64-bit  platforms with sufficient RAM, developers can process large amounts of data using R.

The Bridge to R requires WPS 2.5 or higher. The Bridge is provided as part of the Analyst Power Package
and is included when you license WPS from MineQuest.

http://www.minequest.com/WindowsPowerPack.html

Parallel Process with MPExec
MPExec allows the WPS developer to dramatically reduce processing time by easily implementing parallel processing on their Windows workstation or  server. MPExec allows WPS developers to take existing WPS/SAS code and by inserting a few statements, allow your programs to access all the cores  and resources on your Windows hardware platform. MPExec allows you to parallel process up to 255 tasks and manages the collection of log and listing  files for you.

Other 3rd party applications are-

http://www.uniqcus.com/english/products.html

UniQZConnect

UniQZConnect will allow your SAS and WPS users to have a SAS or WPS session on a Windows Workstation to connect directly to SAS or WPS on z/OS. This give the user the ability to download and upload data from and to z/OS, but also to submit SAS jobs for remote execution.

The product support Wizard user dialog, full script interface, and a mixture of theese.

The Performance of the product is only limited by your current mainframe bottle necks and the current transfer limits of your FTP connection. The Security is handled through FTP ensuring that you are in compliance with your current security policies.

You can download a product sheet for UniQZConnect here.

and an upcoming application from Wolfgang at http://www.wcmat.com/cmat/

Things ToDo
CMAT was first written for Unix and later for Windows. We are now working on a 32 bit version for Linux and Unix, and after that on a 64 bit version for Windows, Linux, and Unix. We are also working on an interface to WPS and R.

—–

Overall creating applications or extensions can help WPS reach a wider audience. While Rapid Miner also has an marketplace for extensions and JMP also has extensions, one critical feature in statistical computing development is where coders can finally earn some money by creating algorithms, packages and extensions (atleast to compare with game creators on mobiles!!)

 

 

 

WPS Version 3 Released

Apparently-you can now use the language of SAS on a Mac using the British software WPS

http://teamwpc.co.uk/press/wps3_released

WPS software ready for Big Data, Cloud Computing and Apple Mac

ONDON, UK – 2 February 2012 – World Programming today released version 3 of their leading WPS data processing and analytics software.

Big data processing at affordable prices is driving adoption of WPS in the datacentre and across the enterprise for analytics, business intelligence and prediction, data management, ETL and reporting.

WPS version 3 boosts support for the language of SAS, extending core data processing capabilities as well as analytics and graphing. Further improvements have been made to performance and scalability together with a wide range of supported platforms.

The popularity of Linux platforms continues to grow as organisations look for platform flexibility and control over costs. WPS Link technology with WPS version 3 offers the option to use the popular WPS Workbench user interface (GUI) to connect to and run programs in server, grid, cluster and cloud environments, suiting modern datacentre-driven compute facilities.

Version 3 also brings the WPS Workbench user interface to Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and Linux platforms including Linux for System z. The WPS Workbench benefits from significant enhancements including: improved handling and display of automatically generated output; importing and exporting data; multiple concurrent program execution; code generation templates and more.

WPS statistical analysis capability continues to expand. Organisations are increasingly looking to use their data to provide the insight, prediction and intelligence to make decisions that will affect their future. WPS has the power to handle the big data volumes of the modern enterprise and to produce results that can be depended on.

WPS version 3 is available as a free upgrade to all WPS license holders.

Related Links

www.teamwpc.co.uk/support/release/wps : Summary of all the major new features in WPS version 3 plus additional downloadable documents (release notes, change log, issues).

www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps : Explore in more detail all the features of WPS software.

More Information About WPS

WPS is a competitively priced, high performance, highly scalable data processing and analytics software product that allows users to execute programs written in the language of SAS. WPS is supported on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms and can connect to and work with many types of data with ease. The WPS user interface (Workbench) is frequently praised for its ease of use and flexibility, with the option to include numerous third-party extensions.

Press Enquiries: press@teamwpc.co.uk

and

http://teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps

Overview

World Programming System (WPS)

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

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:

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.

 

and

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.

Reaver for testing Wireless Security

Ever felt that the WEP network of you or your friends is too weak.  Test it using Reaver. Apparently.

http://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/

Reaver implements a brute force attack against Wifi Protected Setup (WPS) registrar PINs in order to recover WPA/WPA2 passphrases, as described in http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/viehboeck_wps.pdf.

Reaver has been designed to be a robust and practical attack against WPS, and has been tested against a wide variety of access points and WPS implementations.

On average Reaver will recover the target AP’s plain text WPA/WPA2 passphrase in 4-10 hours, depending on the AP. In practice, it will generally take half this time to guess the correct WPS pin and recover the passphrase.

 

Also read-

http://www.wi-fi.org/files/20110421_China_Symposia_full_merge.pdf

and

http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/

and

http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/

 

Jobs in Analytics

Some job openings from WPS/Analytic Searches.com

Please review WPS searches below and contact me if you would like to have a confidential conversation.

Full position descriptions at http://www.analyticsearches.com/wps-search-current-positions/ .

Submit resume/ questions to mary@analyticsearches.com.

All referrals are appreciated and earn you $1000.00 each when hired.
—————————————————————————————-
Associate Analytics & Research/Connecticut
Bank Business Analyst/IL/To $95K
Bank Manager/Model Dev & Risk Mgt/IL/To $140K
Banking Risk Analyst/IL/To $100K
Credit Card Risk Analyst/ Illinois
Director, Analytics/Chicago/To $130K
Director of Analytics/NJ/To $140K
Quantitative Manager Advanced Analytics/DC/To $150K
Quantitative Modeler/DC/To $130K
Research Statistician/IL/To $110K
Senior Manager Data & Analytics/NY, IL/To $110K
Statistician/San Diego
VP Actuary Pricing/Connecticut
VP Digital Strategist/Chicago/To $150K
VP Enterprise Catastrophe Strategy and Reporting/CT
VP Strategy & Analytics/Chicago/To $150K

Submit resume or questions to mary@analyticsearches.com.

http://www.analyticsearches.com

Using SAS and R Together

Proc r

 I really liked this code snippet paper from JSS, enough to upload and embed it here. It shows using R from within Base SAS is quite easy, though Phil Rack, of Minequest gets credit for writing the earliest macros on that (in SAS language product WPS ) at http://www.minequest.com/Bridge2R.html .
I also liked Phil Holland’s paper on that at http://www.hollandnumerics.co.uk/pdf/SAS2R2SAS_paper.pdf
and Sam Croker’s paper on using Time Series in both SAS and R at
A great blog on using both languages together is
SAS and R: Data Management, Statistical Analysis, and Graphics
The earliest book on the topic of R being used by SAS users was by Bob Muenchen, of course at
R for SAS and SPSS Users (Statistics and Computing)

Of course you can refer to official SAS/IML documentation as well for using SAS and R -
Case Studies on using R and SAS together can be seen from here-

 multiple case studies, and in each a comparison of R and SAS, as well as ways of combining the two together. This included calling R from SAS, and using R to generate SAS code.

Most striking for me was the comparison of SAS with R in a live, corporate financial context, and the presentation of R as a viable, robust, industrial strength option, with some unique advantages, and admitted weaknesses.

I hope that Hong can present this again to the Sydney Users of R Forum (SURF)

His presentation slides can be found here.

but the last word goes to this document on doing graphs  from

http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/RafeDonahue/doingmore_currentversion.pdf

drawing a plot with SAS/Graph and then modify its defaults and make it better. Along the way I will discuss issues that will arise with how the code runs and how SAS works and whatnot.
Then we’ll start over and do the whole thing all over again with R.