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. __________________________________ All your favorites on one personal page – Try My Yahoo! ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html