Since November 2025 I have been reducing the prices of my paperbacks on Lulu.com in “odd” months, because I felt that the price hiking used by Amazon and other resellers was unfair to both my readers and me.
I have now found a way to permanently reduce the prices on Lulu.com by creating duplicate book projects, one for resellers only and the other just for Lulu.com. The book contents are identical, but the Lulu.com only versions will be printed on heavier paper (80gsm) and priced lower. The reseller versions will still be printed on 60gsm paper.
This newsletter is the home of Foundation SAS and brings you information about making the most of SAS 9 and Altair SLC. This newsletter issue includes an article from LeRoy Bessler about distorted 3D pie charts, and we welcome a new VIEWS Consultant, Pablo Orosco Joerger, with an article about integrating SAS and R programming languages in Altair SLC. As usual I have publicised some SAS-related events for the next few months, and I have also added some more SAS formats, options and functions that you may or may not have come across before, but you might find interesting, and even useful.
If you would like to contribute an article, to re-visit and improve an existing article, or just discuss the possibility of doing so, please feel free to send an email to me at view-uk@hollandnumerics.org.uk or phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk. Publication deadlines are the 14th day of February, May, August and November each year.
To be able to read this and all previous issues you will need to follow these steps:
If you have not already registered on this blog site, go to blog.hollandnumerics.org.uk and register for free membership.
Once successfully registered, click the menu item [Subscriptions for Forums and Features] > [Request access to the VIEWS UK forum] to request free access to the VIEWS UK forum, then add your name and email address to the form before clicking [Send].
On receipt of a request for an existing blog member I will register them for free access to the VIEWS UK forum, and then send them an email to confirm this.
The next time they log onto the blog site they will see VIEWS UK in the forum list, where you will find the latest issue of VIEWS News, forum topics to find the backissues, functions and formats in every published issue, and a tag cloud covering every forum on the site to which you have access, including VIEWS UK and the VIEWS News issues.
They will also be automatically informed of any VIEWS UK updates.
Anyone receiving emails from this blog should allow the sender to be phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk, because I have finally fixed the From field in the blog’s outgoing emails. Previously it would have been From: phil@hollandnumerics.com with Reply-to: phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk. Please check your Spam folders regularly for emails from the new address.
This may seem a trivial change, but it required setting up a new SMTP server. However, this has solved so many awkward workarounds on the blog site. The only restriction will be that the blog will be limited to 200 outgoing emails per day, so I will not be able to guarantee immediate notification by email of new blog posts, because notification emails will have to be spread over several days.
Let us see how successful this change will be, and please let me know if you experience any issues.
Please do not buy these paperbacks from resellers now they have become available, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., as the resellers over-inflate their prices, but wait for discounted prices for the paperbacks on Lulu.com between the 1st and 30th day of “odd” months (Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep and Nov), or download the equivalent ebooks instead (always discounted) from the Book Table, which is where the lowest prices for my paperbacks and ebooks can always be found.
You may ask why I am discounting the book prices. I consider the discounted paperbacks on Lulu.com and discounted downloads on this site to be a win-win: you pay a much lower price than on Amazon and I get a higher royalty payment!!
Please support your independent authors and publishers! Thank you.
Purchasers of digital files that are paid-for, and NOT free, will now be emailed the files they buy. New versions of already purchased ebooks will have the new version automatically emailed to you, so please make sure your blog profile email address is always up-to-date.
If you download a free file, then that will still require downloading using the emailed link. Please remember to log into your blog profile BEFORE you use the link in that email.
Hopefully these changes will simplify purchasing ebooks from this blog site. Don’t forget to check the Book Table for new and reduced-price books, as it will always include links to the lowest prices available.
Very often New Year’s Resolutions fail because the task is too hard to start, or too expensive to achieve. However, learning SAS language programming in 2026 will be much less expensive by using the free Personal Edition of Altair SLC.
Altair SLC can run more than 90% of all SAS language programs with no alterations, and much more with minor tweaks. Also, unlike SAS OnDemand for Academics (SODA), the Personal Edition of Altair SLC can be used for commercial work and includes some functionality from SAS Viya related to machine learning that is not in SODA, and includes interfaces to R and Python installations, so all 3 programming languages could be used in the same program. While the Personal Edition is not able to access remote data or run in batch mode, which requires a paid-for licence, it can be used with unlimited data.
So, now you can access free software to practice your programming, how do you learn about how to program?
I have published many books about SAS programming, most of which are available as low-cost PDF ebooks. However, I have recently written a book specifically about Altair SLC, which is also available as an ebook and costs just GBP 5.00 to download. It explains what to expect from Altair SLC and how to download it. This appears to be a version-dependent ebook, but, by downloading this ebook from this blog site, you will be able to re-download this ebook for any future edition that is published at no extra cost, so, whenever it is updated, you can download the latest version. This will also apply to the 3 new Altair SLC books that are planned for publication later in 2026.
Please do not buy these paperbacks from resellers now they have become available, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., as the resellers over-inflate their prices, but wait for discounted prices for the paperbacks on Lulu.com between the 1st and 30th day of “odd” months (Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep and Nov), or download the equivalent ebooks instead (always discounted) from the Book Table, which is where the lowest prices for my paperbacks and ebooks can always be found.
You may ask why I am discounting the book prices. I consider the discounted paperbacks on Lulu.com and discounted downloads on this site to be a win-win: you pay a much lower price and I get a higher royalty payment!!
Please support your independent authors and publishers! Thank you.
This newsletter is the home of Foundation SAS and brings you information about making the most of SAS 9 and Altair SLC. This bumper issue includes articles from this year’s August and November issues, which have been combined due to holidays and illness, after my retirement in April 2025, delayed publication until now. This newsletter issue includes 2 articles from LeRoy Bessler about improving time series or trend graphs and vertical bar charts, and I have contributed a Workflow tip from an upcoming book about Altair SLC. My 2nd Editions of my “SAS Programming Experiences” and “Altair SLC” paperbacks are now available on Amazon and other resellers, but please read my article to get copies at the best available prices. As usual I have publicised some SAS-related events for the next few months, and I have also added some more SAS formats, options and functions that you may or may not have come across before, but you might find interesting, and even useful.
If you would like to contribute an article, to re-visit and improve an existing article, or just discuss the possibility of doing so, please feel free to send an email to me at view-uk@hollandnumerics.org.uk or phil@hollandnumerics.org.uk. Publication deadlines are the 14th day of February, May, August and November each year.
To be able to read this and all previous issues you will need to follow these steps:
If you have not already registered on this blog site, go to blog.hollandnumerics.org.uk and register for free membership.
Once successfully registered, click the menu item [Subscriptions for Forums and Features] > [Request access to the VIEWS UK forum] to request free access to the VIEWS UK forum, then add your name and email address to the form before clicking [Send].
On receipt of a request for an existing blog member I will register them for free access to the VIEWS UK forum, and then send them an email to confirm this.
The next time they log onto the blog site they will see VIEWS UK in the forum list, where you will find the latest issue of VIEWS News, forum topics to find the backissues, functions and formats in every published issue, and a tag cloud covering every forum on the site to which you have access, including VIEWS UK and the VIEWS News issues.
They will also be automatically informed of any VIEWS UK updates.
On 02Nov2025 I was effectively forced to migrate my blog site’s database from mySQL to MariaDB. Fortunately open-source MariaDB is advertised as compatible with mySQL, so all I did during the migration was:
Replace the mySQL database in the blog site Docker container with an empty MariaDB database by creating a new Docker volume for MariaDB.
Start the blog container, restore the WordPress plugins, and restore the most recent database backup. Remember the MariaDB is compatible with mySQL!
Restart the blog container.
I have now been running the blog site with MariaDB for a week, so what have I noticed?
The server is no longer running out of disk space due to frequently created large log files in the database volume (previously mySQL, but now MariaDB). Was there an underlying problem in mySQL?
I had been using MariaDB for my ownCloud database in a separate Docker container, but, now that I am running 2 instances of MariaDB in separate containers, there are NO interactions, even though the same database software is being used by both containers! Note that I could, in future, use different versions if necessary.
MariaDB feels that it is running faster than mySQL, but, while I have no data to prove this, it is no longer creating any log files, so my feeling may not be just subjective.
Not using mySQL means that I am no longer dependent on Oracle support for my databases. Note that I have, for a long time, been using software applications and platforms supported by open-source communities (LibreOffice, WordPress, Linux, Lulu.com, ownCloud, Eclipse, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, GraphViz, and now MariaDB).
Please do not buy these paperbacks from resellers now they have become available, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., as the resellers over-inflate their prices, but wait for discounted prices for the paperbacks on Lulu.com between the 1st and 30th day of “odd” months (Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep and Nov), or download the equivalent ebooks instead (always discounted) from the Book Table, which is where the lowest prices for my paperbacks and ebooks can always be found.
You may ask why I am discounting the book prices. I consider the discounted paperbacks on Lulu.com and discounted downloads on this site to be a win-win: you pay a much lower price and I get a higher royalty payment!!
Please support your independent authors and publishers! Thank you.
STOP PRESS: Apologies for my blog site not being accessible between 31Oct2025 and early 02Nov2025. The site’s mySQL database became corrupted, so the blog site is now using a more stable and compatible MariaDB database. Fortunately, no data has been lost.
On Thursday 09 October I reported that a server issue had been resolved. However, overnight a new problem surfaced. This has now been fixed too.
So what was the fault?
[Technical description!] The new problem was already there in the Apache2 configuration, but was previously hidden. While I had limited the number of active and spare tasks, I had not limited the number of clients. This has now been added and normal operations have been restored.
When I reported the original issue I promised that all of my ebook downloads would be discounted, and I always to keep my promises, so until 17Oct2025 there will be a 10% discount on all PDF ebook downloads from this site.
See the Book Table page and search for books with “PDF” in their names.
On Monday 29 September I reported a server issue to you on LinkedIn, Twitter/X and Mastodon. I can now report that my server restarted successfully this morning, and not showing any signs of the problem it had.
So what was the fault?
[Technical description!] I use Docker to run individual server containers on my physical server, which are each restarted on a daily basis using a *.yml control file. Over the last weekend in September one of those *.yml files had become corrupted, and the retries parameter, which had previous been “5”, became “5?????” (where ? was a non-printable character). The retries parameter tells the container how many tasks can be generated at a time, which had been 5, but after the corruption became undefined. This resulted in too many tasks, and more than the server could run, being created. The non-printable characters have now been removed, and normal operations have been restored.
When I reported the issue I promised that all of my ebook downloads would be discounted, and I always to keep my promises, so for the next 7 days (ending on 17Oct2025) there will be a 10% discount on all ebook downloads from this site.
See the Book Table page and search for books with “PDF” in their names.
Enjoy………..Phil
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